#if the tigers lose doug is going to lose it
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My redneck neighbor Doug watches 'The Bad Batch': Pabu
So, maybe it's because the Razorbacks are currently up over the Tigers, which makes Doug's LSU loving self extra fired up this evening, but I have made the mistake of asking him again about his opinion on the episode after 'The Outpost', which was 'Pabu'.
He called this both 'HR Goes to Daytona' and 'Did I miss an episode?'.
Doug: Make sure you put one of my Baton Rouge boys on the internet too right now. GEAUX TIGERS.
CW: Doug insults everyone, everything, and is generally a cantankerous old jerk in this one. His wife should have unplugged his internet. Lots of adult everything, ranging from language to...well, if you're under 18, please be warned.
Prepare thyself, especially if you're a TechxPhee fan. The amount of angry emojis I got in the text messages were pretty wild.
----
'Pabu' aka 'HR Goes to Daytona'
Oh it’s Church Lady and it’s Sunday service. Why is little orphan blondie in the bar with her? Daddy Rambo has his knife but you know the man was plowing vodka out of sight here. He’s tired.
I thought he hated Church Lady? Did I miss an episode?
Ah, now Ryan-from-Accounting is playing solitaire. Atta boy, get your mind off the bitch wife Laura. If he makes out with that garbage robot I’ll throw up.
Time to skee-daddle. Woah! Church Lady just grabbed Ryan-from-Accounting. That man looks terrified, probably because he found a Youtube video of her taking down muggers behind Manning's after a Pelicans game. Bitch wife Laura gonna blow a gasket.
But such is the way of the Church Lady, I have known many in my day. “I groped the hot new usher in Jesus’s house, but it’s okay, The Lord forgives”.
(praise the Lord and pass the Tabasco)
No, seriously, did I miss an episode? I feel like I did.
Houma-BBQ bitch is bitching, as is her wont. I wonder what sauce her tail would taste best with. Carolina Gold? I’d cook her brisket style. Oh, wait, back to the show.
And now they’re on paradise! Daytona Beach! Who is this guy, he looks like he used to play hoops now he plays how much dessert he can eat at Golden Corral. Props to him, that lava cake is gold. Hope Rex and Toaster Strudel are there.
Where are Rex and Toaster Strudel.
No, really, where are Rex and Toaster Strudel.
I’m getting real mad here, where are Rex and Toaster Strudel.
CHURCH LADY, GET BACK IN YOUR SPACE UBER AND GO FIND REX AND TOASTER STRUDEL. I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR MUSEUM OF SHIT YOU FOUND IN PEOPLE’S BACKYARDS AND THE DUMPSTER BEHIND THE KEY LARGO PUBLIX, GO GET REX AND TOASTER STRUDEL.
SHOVE RYAN-FROM-ACCOUNTING BACK INTO THE DRIVER’S SEAT, PAY FOR HIS GAS, AND GO GET REX AND TOASTER STRUDEL.
“You have some competition”. From what, there’s gonna be a hot dog eating contest or something? Why does Ryan-from-Accounting look so upset?
(“I think they’re trying to set him and Phee up, Doug.” “What, when did that happen? Did I miss an episode?”)
Ryan-from-Accounting looks either sad or excited and I’m so confused. Maybe it’s because I’ve been married since before the dinosaurs but why is he either frowning and freaked out by Church Lady or smiling at Church Lady? Is he having a breakdown like my nephew did after he lost his job? Does Bitch Wife Laura know about this? Does he like Church Lady or is he planning on pepper spraying her? Did I miss an episode? Is this how the children flirt on the Ticky-Tack? No wonder y’all aren’t getting married any more.
(“Doug, you did not miss an episode. And it is called Tik-Tok.” “I MISSED AN EPISODE. I KNOW I DID, AND IT IS CALLED THE TICKY-TACK!!!”)
Ya know who would solve these questions? REX AND MOTHER LOVING TOASTER STRUDEL, WHO AIN’T HERE. THEY NEED TO BE HERE. WHERE ARE YOU HIDING THEM CHURCH LADY.
Oh lovely, Hoops forgot to make a reservation at BoneFish, so they’re having his gas station sushi. Not one shrimp or crab on that table? Y’all Hoops is failing so hard right now, as a boy from Louisiana I’m just offended. His momma raised that man WRONG.
You know who would love sushi on the beach while watching the sun set? REX AND TOASTER STRUDEL, and Daddy Warcrimes and Sassy Park Ranger too.
I MISS SASSY PARK RANGER ALREADY!!!!!!
But no, Rex and Toaster Strudel are busy at work saving the galaxy while Julio and the gang throw back cocktails and stare at the sun like they dropped cheap acid they bought in a sketchier part of Biloxi. Which is all of Biloxi, I guess.
Oh, and Ryan-from-Accounting is awkward around Church Lady and stares at his phone lest that Bitch Wife Laura of his get a snap of them sitting together and Little Orphan Blondie pets a monkey. I hope they all get food poisoning. I’m so mad.
They need Toaster Strudel the way I need FSU to lose this weekend, I have money on that game too. WHY IS ARKANSAS STILL UP IN THE SECOND QUARTER.
Ah, Little Orphan Blondie’s on a boat with her new buddy, that’s nice. If she doesn’t find Rex and Toaster Strudel out in the ocean with James Cameron I hope–oh, shoot, I was in the navy. I know what that water means. Oh boy.
Well bless Ryan-from-Accounting, he watches Big Tuna and knows how to do a rescue. Church Lady looks happy. He finally touched her, it only took a natural disaster and a whole lot of nagging on her part. Oh, poor Church Lady, you need a guy who actually likes you back.
Seriously, why does that man look like the subject of them shitty videos HR makes us watch once a year so we don’t get sued? I don’t know, but I’m starting to understand why his Bitch Wife Laura is the way she is. I can’t believe the episode they filmed in Daytona makes me feel for her, but it do.
(“Doug, you’re making up Bitch Wife Laura in your head. She’s not in the show.” “Well, it’s clear that I missed some episodes, so maybe I missed the Bitch Wife Laura ones.” “No, you didn’t miss any, I promise.” “Are you SURE?!”)
Man, the tsunami got people running like it’s Black Friday Wal-Mart in Tampa. But they rescued an old guy and Daddy Rambo got the stolen work truck working to rescue the kids. Hooray, I guess.
You know who would have done a better job? Of all of this?
REX AND MOTHER-LOVING TOASTER STRUDEL. But they ain’t here!
(Doug's love for them runs hard and it runs deep, for which I can empathize)
You know who should have been on a beach horking down Mai Tais and getting into Church Lady and her handsy hands?
POOR POOR SASSY PARK RANGER. BUT HE DIED BACK IN WYOMING. I bet he’d love a back massage from Church Lady too! He’d sass her, she’d sass him back, and they’d make out on the beach while Daddy Warcrimes played the saxophone behind them or something. I support that. I’d like that. He’s got brown eyes.*
Make it work, Star Wars, damn it.
(Doug has unlocked a new rarepair, I guess: Mayday and Phee? WTF?)
Well they’re hanging out here in Daytona for the time being, I guess. Julio passed out under a tree like a drunk uncle at a cookout. Everyone's smiling.
I’d be smiling too, knowing that REX AND TOASTER STRUDEL ARE ACTUALLY SAVING PEOPLE WHILE YOU CLOWNS STOMP AROUND FLORIDA.
Stop smiling at Church Lady, Ryan-from-Accounting! Is it because you finally filed HR complaint paperwork or because you filed for divorce papers from Bitch Wife Laura? Why are you smiling?! Church Lady belongs to Sassy Park Ranger!
(“Doug…Sassy Park Ranger’s dead. He and Church Lady never met. You need to stop.” “IF THEY CAN BRING PALPATINE BACK, THEY CAN BRING SASSY PARK RANGER BACK TOO!”)
*=I NEED FAN ART OF THIS NOW, please @amalthiaph! Help me out!
#tbb#the bad batch#clone force 99#doug talks star wars#redneck doug#thebadbatch#tech the bad batch#hunter the bad batch#omega the bad batch#doug the neighbor#tech x phee#phee genoa#shep the bad batch#pabu#lsu is somehow involved#if the tigers lose doug is going to lose it#mayday x phee#mayday x phee is a thing now i guess wtf#WTF#wrecker the bad batch#doug is amazing#doug why
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So, Dan Howell, huh?
I went to the matinee performance of We’re All Doomed in Amsterdam with my friend Sammy. Originally, Sammy and I bought the cheapest balcony seats but the matinee didn’t sell as well as the evening show (which was fully sold out), so they closed the balcony completely and they moved us to row 8 from the stage, which was insane. We got an e-mail with the information, but on the day itself I led Sammy to our seats and I was shook when we passed so many other people. Later on we found out that we paid almost half the price from someone who’s on row 20. Woah.
Sammy and I went into this show with ZERO knowledge, entirely spoiler free. If you want that as well for your show, then stop reading here!
Some highlights, in no particular order:
When Dan appeared on stage with the elevator in the staircase, the person next to me said “wow, so boyband”
“Ik ben Dan!”
THE ENTIRE OPENING SONG I DID NOT SEE IT COMING.
He told us he invested our ticket sales into the lightning, but he also said he is losing money so “please buy a t-shirt” (I did not. I did not buy any merch.)
BUT I DID HAVE SOME “““MERCH”““ FRON ANNE @justgleekout WHO I MET THERE AND SHE HAS AMAZING BUTTONS AND CARDS AND IT WAS VERY NICE TO SEE HER AND SHE ALSO RECOGNISED SUNSHUNES’S ART CAUSE YES I HAVE A KLAINE BUTTON ON MY BAG.
Honestly the entire tech element was banging, although the sound was very high volume, but I loved the screen and the lights.
I have been told by @dnptheinfinity that this was probably scripted but the entire monologue that ended with Dan saying “I wanted to suck [Harry Style’s] cock” took me out because of the delivery of that line.
Dan, as any foreigner, kept mispronouncing stroopwafel to, idk, stroepwafful.
Not gonna lie, Dan, there was a missed opportunity. He talked about how orange made his stuff look like the pornhub logo and that Grindr should’ve sponsored it, and I was like “dude, you could’ve made such a good joke about how orange is the Dutch national colour”
Speaking of stroepwaffuls, he sort of kissed Ben during the bubbles (or bubbels, in Dutch, cause the box said bubbels) segment cause Ben arrived with a stroepwafful in his mouth and Dan took it from his mouth with his own. Then after he munched on his stroepwafful he mentioned that that was probably a HR violation. Not sure if it’s scripted, since Dan looked genuinely surprised when Ben came on stage with the cookie but @ evening people (hi Anne!) did this happen again?
Other Dutch stuff: Harry Styles (”ha suck it Taylor Swift fans, y’all weren’t swift enough”) and Dutch member of parliament Jesse Klaver have an affair where they suck on each other’s breasts and they have two kids: cactus and aubergine.
Other Dutch madlib: Phil is a cult member, operating from the HEMA basement. The tech person misspelled it as Hayma though.
One audience member yelled “dildo” when Dan asks what to buy in the HEMA. It didn’t end up being the madlib, but this was the awkward moment where I told Sammy that HEMA did recently partner with EasyToys, which is wild.
The audience was fun. Shout out to the person who without hesitation said they’d fuck Doug Bury Pillboy, whuch took Dan out.
Someone also yelled “furry” almost at the beginning of the show, after Dan first talks about Tony the Tiger and he was so taken aback by it and he started laughing. There were many moments where he’d just laugh, like when someone cheered for the polyamorous lesbian future!
When he took off his top and everyone cheered he yelled “I thought you were all lesbians? Bisexuals? Bisexuality isn’t real!”
The best audience moment is during the bubbles when he said “I am going to blow-” and the audience started cheering after “blow” so he couldn’t finish his sentence because of the cheers but also because he laughed for a solid 15 seconds when he realised that it is an unintentional blowjob joke.
OKAY another good one is when he asked whether he should be send to hell or heaven, aka fire or freedom, someone yelled “DAN IS NOT ON FIRE” and oh man, his face.
“I am unapologetically gay, maybe you’ve picked up on that during the show-” “ME TOO!” “Oh, hey, you too!”
There was also this older grandpa a few rows in front of me, but he genuinely seemed to enjoy it. He kept laughing at all the gay sex jokes.
There were so many gay sex jokes.
“I also feel safe when I am inside a bear.” bro
“It’s right. I am a cocksucker. Sorry, it’s rude to talk with my mouth full.”
He used the elevator for the beginning and the end of act 1, but for act two he just walked on stage with a chair and jumpscared the audience by saying “hi”, cause we were still in intermission. “Sit the fuck down. Thank you.” Lights went out. Show was back!
By the way, Sammy and I did not know there was going to be an interval. We were extremely unprepared. We thought the show would be, like, an hour or so, so at the act 1 end we thought “huh, this is a bold way to end a show”.
THE MASS BOOING WHEN DAN PUT J/K ROWLING ON SCREEN DURING THE JUDGING
Dan said he was reliving his Legally Blonde fantasy during that segment.
All the game segments were really fun.
And of course, the deep shit. I knew there was a deep shit segment, because Anthony Padilla said so in his interview (which is why the act 1 ending confused me so much). When he showed the emoji calendar so many people were shocked and saddened and one person loudly yelled “Jeezus!” and someone else shouted “Do you want a hug?”
Not gonna lie, when he said something among the lines of “Yes, death is inevitable, but you have to live first” I was like... dude.... DUDE... woah. He said a lot of good shit there in that segment, but that one stuck with me.
I didn’t know the show would end with a clipshow of happy moments and it was so fitting with Dan climbing up the stairs to get a better look at it 10/10 staging, Danny boi.
SOMEONE BROUGHT HIM TULIPS FOR THE FINAL BOW.
#also under cut in case i remember more#dan howell#lb 2023#i was going to do a Proper Review in my sort of abandoned rec this thing series but alas
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Melbourne Demons 2022 Season Review Snapshot
Rounds 1-7:
The 2021 season was one to remember as the Demons became premiers for the first time in 57 years. And come Wednesday March 17th, 2022, the Demons would be doing something they weren’t too familiar with. That was defending their title. There weren’t any signs of inexperience in this however, as the Dees got off to a blistering start with an Ed Langdon snap kickstarting a comprehensive victory over their grand final rivals. Similarly, to the previous season, the Demons went on to start an impressive winning streak as they took control of the Suns, Bombers, Power and Giants in consecutive weeks. Round 6 saw the Demons play in their annual Anzac eve game against the 2020 premiers in the Tigers. And after having previous seasons where Richmond had been consistently the better team, the Demons were far too good on this occasion as they continued to install more fear into the rest of the competition. Although, things weren’t too easy the following the week against the Hawks. Without the help of Simon Goodwin as coach due to COVID, assistant Adam Yze was left with the task of keeping the Dees’ streak alive. Thanks to key contributors in Ben Brown (four goals), Clayton Oliver (33 disposals) and Christian Petracca (31 disposals), Melbourne were able to improve to 7-0 after a ten-point victory and solidify their spot-on top of the ladder.
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Rounds 8-16:
In Tom McDonald’s 200th game, the reigning premiers were far too good for an inform Saints side as they continued to march towards a perfect record. Two more comprehensive wins against the Eagles and North Melbourne, saw the club extend their unbeaten run to 17 games and further strengthen their confidence in going back-to-back. Unfortunately, however, the impressive run of wins would end as the club met their match when they played the Dockers during Sir Doug Nicholls round the following week. An injured Steven May made things worse for the Demons as they would badly miss him the following week in their 12-point loss to the Swans. Round 13 saw the return of the Big Freeze at the G for the first time in two years as the Demons would take on an inform Collingwood in front of almost 80 thousand people. The Pies were too good on this occasion which saw the club take three straight losses into the bye. A top of the table clash gave the club an enormous opportunity at bouncing back. Thanks to a Jack Viney masterclass, the Demons were able to dismantle the Lions at the G and get back to winning ways in style. This continued onto next week as the Dees would defeat the Crows away from home.
Rounds 17-SF:
Inconsistency would start to creep in unfortunately for the Dees as they would go on a five-game stretch that consisted a L-W-L-W-L form line. Losing to the eventual premiers would hurt the boys. Clayton Oliver breaking his thumb would only add more pain to the club who were now desperate of finding some good form. Some Kozzy Pickett magic in round 18 would see the Dees take care of the Power in the NT. The hometown hero kicked a whopping six goals that day as the club would make it two from two against Port Adelaide on the season. In both the following week and in round 21, the Dees would unfortunately suffer heartbreak from both the Bulldogs and the Pies. With both games being decided within 10 points. A dominant display against Fremantle in round 20 saw the Demons flex their muscles nicely out west. And a last gasp victory against the Blues in round 22 helped secure the Demons a top 4 finish. After destroying them on home soil earlier in the year, the Demons would apply some hefty damage on the Lions again in round 23, as they concluded their home and away season on a high. Unfortunately for the club, two disappointing finals performances would see the Dees eliminated in straight sets. And ultimately, leave a bitter taste going into 2023 where they look to finally win a flag in front of their home fans.
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HIIIUUHHH I'm finally ready tooooooo LISTEN TO EPISODE 67 aaaaaannnnddd mmmnnnnbhhh. So let's carry on. Also I will be doing several other things while listening so my attention is a liiiittttlllllee spread out.
SPOILERS FOR EP 67
freddiieeeeee. GLEEEEEENNNNNNN. SO WE'RE STARTING IMMEDIATELY WITH THE TEARS.
"This must be my comic retribution. My time is done. Think of my son. Wish you all well. See you in hell." It's so GOOD. And now I remember all of this.
"IT'S ACTUALLY A REALLY SAD DND PODCAST" BETH CANT EVEN GET THROUGH THE INTRO
"I DONT CARE I DONT WANT TO TALK TO YOU" "FVCK OFF ANTHONY" "You don't get to talk Anthony"
"I used to play Glenn Close"
Respect to that dude on reddit. Savin himself
THEIR FAVORITE THING ABOUT GLENN. AWH.
HE DIED THE WAY HE LIVED.
Awwwhh Henry
Awwwwh Rooon
He's fvckin chillin
Glenn got the moral victory
They TRIED. FVCK ANTHONY AND FVCK WILLY
Poor Nick Jr.
Oh you mean this episode is a speed run of their trauma responses when someone they actually care about dies
The kids are gonna have to see it eventually
Also I can't get over the fact that every single parent Nick has had is technically dead except for the Foster Morgan
NICK JR DOING CPR
Ron is about make me cry again
Grant was already suuuper fvcked up. Of course Terry is horrified, probably had the clearest mindset. Sparrow becoming a lovewolf definitely brought down his resistance to this. Lark baby bring hell.
I'm scream.
Reincarnation that's what I was thinking
That's the thing. The willing soul thing. I don't think he would be. All he wanted was his son, he was already thinking about staying because there's NOTHING for him in the real world, and when he's dead he gets to be with Nick, he could do magic and play. Like I don't think there would be a reason he would come back. I mean yeah the dads but like that was his reasoning
"Mmmnnhh in THIS economy"
A DRAGONBORN
I KNEW IT
RON HAS SO MUCH GUILT ABOUT THAT
I mEan Henry's right
We get to jump him FVCK YEAH SCREW HIM
The thing about Glenn's death that upsets me the most was that he figured one thing could like make him feel better was killing his dad AND NOW HE CANT
OOOHHHH Dream spell
Honestly I think it would be better if it was just Ron
"YOU READY FOR THIS BABABABUMBUM"
"Kick his fvckin azz Ron" I can't wait for them to kill Willy
We gotta reassure Terry whoops scared him
"We'll talk about this later. Omg I'm like a Wilson"
Oooooo Beth is going full force
"You're enough just as you are. And you are nothing" A. That feels like something Willy said to Ron and now is just saying back and B. Beth has had that ready for a bit.
OOOOOOOOOOO FVCK YOU WILLY
We gotta speed this up a little
You right you right Henry
3 dad try to roll their dead friend into a blunt
We smoke Glenn's anchor
Henry been done this
All or nothing AHHHHHHHHH
McRadical my dudes
PROMOTION FOR DOUG
"I knew killing those people would be worth it"
"I know you're a murderer Doug"
Always Be Grinding
I love Doug so much
Wait I thought about this last time. They can't get the car back without Glenn and with how spells work the fake car is gone too
"Darryl, Darryl slow down"
Glenn's some really did something
OOOOO WE'RE BREAKING HENRY'S ANCHOR. I'm so scared they're just releasing the Doodler.
Your inner ability is the fvcking Doodler
Also I thought they had to break their anchors once they were at the portal for some reason. I probably had reasons but now I don't remember
Henry has issues and this is why your kids probably eat mold
"You guys were judging me for not putting water in Terry Jr's oatmeal."
Everyone really I'm WATCHING you lose your insides
Mmmmm bacteria
The resistance
Henry's body bacteria literally jumps the mold
"You walked into the wrong mircobiome"
I hope Lark doesn't like hate him when they get back
The kids get to do something safe... Which is laying the explosives
RONBAT
You go Doug
I mean we basically have one (1) solid success with Ron
Darryl you're scaring me
HENRY you're scaring me
WHEEEEEWWWWW
We kill Darryl at noon
Let's hope they don't kill Doug
God they like playing fvcking VOLLEYBALL with my heart
Even Anthony seemed relieved
YEAH MURDER
It's what Glenn would've wanted
But it AINT BOMB PROOF
We love Freddie wombat facts
THEYRE FVCKING FLYING
"Sorry something in my throat"
You have operation for this
I fvcking screeched
WHIRLWIND
TRY to escape
"Dadly"
Imagine trying to figure out a noise complaint and then being slurped into the ground
I don't think Willy ate 6 month old overnight oats with the mold
Sir, you're religion was 2 kids in a trench coat that happened to be his kids
This is why Henry quit smoking
Just imagine Barry hears this explosion and is like Henry's had weed
"Is it going to explode" "no shvt"
Really gassed them
WOOO DAD SENSE
Henry is a loose cannon
Sneaky sneaky Ron
Also the switch from a heratwrenching drama to an action comedy is mwah
Oh there's 2 ad things that's why I got confused
Awwww the nunchunks
Back to the drama
Glennades
The kids? Oh yeah because they literally just want the kids for their daddy magic
Oh yeah like we kill Paedan, huh
AWWHHHH
Damn Matt
I felt that in my throat I thought it was a burp at first I hate it
AHHHHHHHHH
What did he do whatdidhedo *iheardthescream*
Gotdammit
EYE OF THE TIGER
AWWHHHHH HE GOT IT
No Glenn sorry
DOODLERS ASSEMBLE
Scam Actually
My poor damaged heart
#you could and should absolutely ignore this#random rambling#dndads#dndads spoilers#dungeons and daddies spoilers#dungeons and daddies
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Essential Steven Universe Episodes
Hello everyone!
Looking to watch Steven Universe, but not drag yourself through all the episodes? Never fear! I’ve made a list of what I believe to be the most essential episodes of Steven Universe with unnecessary ones labelled as such (and my reasons why). Now here’s some things to keep in mind before looking at the list:
When I say “essential” I mean ones that introduce important elements to the story. New important characters, new powers, episodes that develop the character and plot-relevant episodes fit this category.
Episodes that develop certain characters will be labeled as “unnecessary” if they don’t contribute enough to the plot or their growth.
There may be some personal bias since I found one or two filler episodes to be enjoyable despite their uselessness to the overall plot but I’ll label them as well so you know.
Avoid reading ahead. The labels for unnecessary ones may contain SPOILERS so if you care about that kind of stuff: you’ve been warned.
On to the list!
Season 1
1. Gem Glow
2. Laser Light Cannon
3. Cheeseburger Backpack: Steven’s first mission
a. Together Breakfast: shows off gem rooms and a monster but that’s really it.
b. Frybo: introduces PeeDee but he doesn’t ever really do anything so...?
4. Cat Fingers
5. Bubble Buddies
6. Serious Steven
a. Tiger Millionaire: while there is some character development, there isn’t really enough to make it worth watching since most of the episode is focused on wrestling.
7. Steven’s Lion
8. Arcade Mania
9. Giant Woman
10. So Many Birthdays: a peek at how dark this show can get
11. Lars and the Cool Kids
a. Onion Trade: mainly about Onion; if you like his character, feel free to watch but if not I’d avoid it since it ultimately doesn’t mean much.
12. Steven the Sword Fighter
13. Lion 2: The Movie
a. Beach Party: Gems piss off the family that runs the town’s pizza shop and try to make it up to them by inviting them to hang out. Shenanigan ensue, but has no lasting impact on the story.
14. Rose’s Room
15. Coach Steven
a. Joking Victim: develops Sadie and Lars’ relationship; skip if you don’t really care about either
16. Steven and the Stevens
17. Monster Buddies
18. An Indirect Kiss
19. Mirror Gem & Ocean Gem
a. House Guest: shows why Steven has trouble with his powers, but nothing too important happens other than that; watch if you wanna see more Pearl & Greg interactions
20. Space Race: shows Pearl’s fondness of space; develops her character and background but not necessary; skip if you want
a. Secret Team: if you don’t like episodes about characters making temporary truces I’d avoid this one; not enough character development to make it worthwhile.
b. Island Adventure: another Sadie and Lars episode; Lars opens about his feelings but not much else happens.
21. Keep Beach City Weird: relevant for SU: Future reasons, but if you don’t like Ronaldo skip
22. Fusion Cuisine
a. Garnet’s Universe: contributes nothing, but is a kinda cute episode.
b. Watermelon Steven: introduces a character(s) that is only used a total of three (maybe four?) times; also introduces a power that is rarely ever used when it matters.
23. Lion 3: Straight to Video
24. Alone Together
25. Warp Tour
a. The Test: some good character discussions, but not important overall.
26. Future Vision
27. On the Run
a. Horror Club: if you don’t care for Ronaldo, Sadie or Lars: skip. Even if you care about Lars, skip this one since you kinda get the gist of his character at this point.
b. Winter Forecast: a few nice moments, but ultimately a big “what-if” episode
28. Maximum Capacity
29. Marble Madness
30. Rose’s Scabbard
a. Open Book: a Steven and Connie episode; fun if you like them, but skippable
b. Shirt Club: focuses on one of the Cool Kids but ultimately means nothing
c. Say Uncle: Uncle Grandpa Crossover; some funny moments from the Gems but if you don’t like UG avoid this one.
31. Story for Steven
32. The Message
a. Political Power: addresses certain concerns the Gems have, but nothing important crosses over into the next episode; most about Mayor Dewey anyway
33. The Return
34. Jailbreak
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Season 2
1. Full Disclosure
a. Joy Ride: Steven messes around with the Cool Kids; there’s a bit here briefly referenced in SU: Future I think, but other than nothing really happens; skip it if you want
b. Love Letters: properly introduces Jamie and shows his character, but he never does anything for the plot. All you need to know if him and Steven are friends.
c. Reformed: introduces Amethyst's new form and shows more of her insecurities but that’s all this episode is really good for.
2. Sworn to the Sword
a. Rising Tides, Crashing Skies: a Ronaldo episode; need I say more?
3. Keeping It Together
4. We Need To Talk
5. Chille Tid
6. Cry for Help
7. Keystone Motel
a. Onion Friend: another Onion episode; addresses how Amethyst feels regarding the current situation, but other than that nothing worthwhile.
b. Historical Friction: Jamie puts on a play and some gem stuff is involved; no action, but tells us about the Gems’ history
8. Friend Ship
a. Nightmare Hospital: mostly about Connie and her mom; some cool scary bits, but skippable.
b. Sadie’s Song: entirely about Sadie and how her mom makes her feel; skip if you don’t care much for Sadie.
9. Catch and Release
10. When It Rains
11. Back to the Barn
a. Too Far: develops Peridot and Amethyst’s relationship, and develops Peridot’s character, but not enough to make this episode necessary
12. The Answer
a. Steven’s Birthday: fun episode, but ultimately contributes nothing
13. It Could’ve Been Great
14. Message Received
a. Log Date 7 15 2: shows how Peridot got to where she is (as a character) and fills in some holes between Catch and Release and Message Received; fun and worth watching but skippable regardless
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Season 3
1. Super Watermelon Island
2. Gem Drill
3. Same Old World
4. Barn Mates
5. Hit the Diamond
a. Steven Floats: introduces new power but not much else
b. Drop Beat Dad: Explains where Greg gets his money, and I guess if you’re a Sour Cream fan watch this one? Skip if you’re not.
6. Mr. Greg
7. Too Short To Ride
a. The New Lars: focuses on Lars mostly, but Sadie also shows up at one point; skip if you don’t care about them.
b. Beach City Drift: watch if you like Stevonnie; skip if you don’t really care.
c. Restaurant Wars: pointless fight between the pizza shop family and the fry stand family. I guess if you like food watch this one, but you can skip this one.
d. Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service: focuses on certain member’s of the pizza family. Skippable, but watch if you like pizza I guess.
8. Monster Reunion
9. Alone at Sea
a. Greg the Babysitter: a “stories of the past” episode where Rose shows up; nothing important really happens though
b. Gem Hunt: a certain character makes a return, but not until the end of the episode; skippable
10. Crack the Whip
a. Steven vs. Amethyst: develops their relationship but skippable overall
11. Bismuth
12. Beta
13. Earthlings
14. Back to the Moon
15. Bubbled
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Season 4
a. Kindergarten Kid: Looney Tunes-esque episode; fun but skippable
b. Know Your Fusion: certain fusions return but still skippable
c. Buddy’s Book: shows off more of the Gems’ history and has Rose in it; still skippable despite all this since none of it is super important.
2. Mindful Education
a. Future Boy Zoltron: skippable since it focuses on Mr. Smiley and a former colleague; watch if you want to see some fun interactions.
b. Last One Out of Beach City: fun episode and shows some of Pearl’s development, but still skippable.
c. Onion Gang: it’s an Onion episode so: skippable.
d. Gem Harvest: Thanksgiving episode; reveals Steven’s real last name but nothing else important.
3. Three Gems and a Baby
4. Steven’s Dream
5. Adventures in Light Distortion
6. Gem Heist
7. The Zoo
8. That Will Be All
a. The New Crystal Gems: shows us what Connie, Lapis and Peridot did while Steven was in space. Nothing really happens so just skip this one.
9. Storm in the Room
a. Rocknaldo: features Ronaldo once again and is arguably one of the worst episodes. Thankfully, it’s skippable.
b. Tiger Philanthropist: callback to an older episode; doesn’t contribute anything to the current plot
10. Room for Ruby
a. Lion 4: Alternate Ending: goes no where and contributes nothing; reveals possible name for Steven if he was a girl though so...cool I guess? Skip it.
11. Doug Out
a. The Good Lars: develops Lars’ character a little, but not much else
12. Are You My Dad
13. I Am My Mom
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Season 5
a. Stuck Together: Steven and Lars’ relationship develops further along with Lars’ character; some dramatic moments make it an overall a good episode, but you can skip it if you want.
1. The Trial
2. Off Colors
3. Lars’ Head
a. Dewey Wins: Steven realizes why Connie’s upset with him; saved you from watching Mayor Dewey for almost eleven minutes.
b. Gemcation: another good episode, but skippable regardless.
4. Raising the Barn
a. Back to the Kindergarten: shows how Peridot feels after a certain event, but nothing else really happens.
b. Sadie Killer: Sadie starts a band and that’s it. Skip if you don’t care much for Sadie.
c. Kevin Party: watch for character drama and one resolution, but skip if you can’t stand Kevin.
5. Lars of the Stars
6. Jungle Moon
7. Your Mother and Mine
a. The Big Show: a Sadie’s band episode; skippable
b. Pool Hopping: shows off Garnet’s fears and insecurities but is still skippable
c. Letters to Lars: basically amounts to Dewey finding his place in town after losing his job; nothing else so just skip this one.
8. Can’t Go Back
9. A Single Pale Rose
10. Now We’re Only Falling Apart
a. What’s Your Problem: develops Steven and Amethyst’s relationship further; skip if you want, but it’s a good episode to watch.
11. The Question
12. Made of Honor
13. Reunited
14. Legs From Here To Homeworld
15. Together Alone
a. Escapism: shows how Steven contacts the B-team but overall just feels kind of out of place? Skip if you want.
16. Change Your Mind (four parts; almost an hour long btw)
-------------------
Watch Steven Universe: The Movie if you plan on watching Steven Universe: Future
-------------------
Steven Universe: Future
1. Little Homeschool
a. Guidance: skippable since nothing in this episode is mentioned ever again. Smoky Quartz is in it though so watch if you like her.
2. Rose Buds
3. Volleyball
a. Bluebird: introduces Greg’s new look and a new fusion that’s never brought up again.
b. A Very Special Episode: fun episode but contributes nothing to the overall story.
4. Snow Day
a. Why So Blue: shows other Lapis Lazulis and shows us how far Lapis has really come; watch if you’re a Lapis fan, but skip if you want.
b. Little Graduation: skip if you never really cared too much about any of the human characters since this is mostly about them.
c. Prickly Pair: downer of an episode; no one ever mentions anything that’s said in this episode, but check it out if you wanna see Steven more of Steven’s plant powers!
6. In Dreams
7. Bismuth Casual
8. Together Forever
9. Growing Pains
a. Mr. Universe: Greg’s history is revealed but doesn’t contribute much so skip if you don’t really care about that too much.
10. Fragments
11. Homeworld Bound
12. Everything’s Fine
13. I Am My Monster
14. The Future
And that’s it! I guess let me know if this list was helpful or not, but other than that: I hope you enjoy Steven Universe!
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1107: The Land that Time Forgot
Watching the opening credits of this actually made me do a double-take – the name Colin Farrell appeared on the screen and I was like, wait, what the fuck? Wouldn’t he have been like two years old? Well, I looked it up and learned that I was wrong: The Land that Time Forgot was made in 1975, and the Colin Farrell I was thinking of wasn’t even born until a year later. At least that woke me up.
It’s World War I, and a passenger ship is torpedoed by a German submarine. The only survivors are a few sailors, Doug McClure, and a Dr. Lisa Clayton who serves as the movie’s designated pretty girl. The nearest thing to rescue in sight is the submarine itself when it surfaces a few hours later – so they climb aboard, storm the hatch, and take over the ship. At first it seems that all they have to do now is head for home, but they soon learn that the Germans have sabotaged the compass. They’ve come ashore instead at the mysterious lost continent of Caprona. Naturally this is a land of cavemen and dinosaurs, and in order to escape the British and the Germans must put aside their differences and work together. Only then will they be able to get back to the real world and resume shooting at each other.
While At the Earth’s Core comes across as a movie nobody gave a much of a shit about, there are places where The Land that Time Forgot is surprisingly artful and well-made. In particular the first half-hour has several very nice moments in it, especially in the way it uses sound. After the opening credits, the music totally vanishes for a third of the film. The only background sounds are the lapping of waves and the creaking of the submarine, which makes gunshots and explosions all the more jarring when they happen. It also makes this part of the movie seem very grounded and real, which contrasts with the more fantastical stuff that happens in Caprona. The first sight of the Capronan cliffs is accompanied by the return of the soundtrack, which ushers us out of this more real world and into the fantasy beyond.
I feel like if Amicus had just set out to make a suspense movie about WWI submarines, a sort of early-20th-century Balance of Terror, they could have done a pretty fair job. Several scenes, such as when the characters are all sitting in the dinghy waiting for the sub to surface, or when they’re diving to escape the British ship firing on them and aren’t sure if the hull will hold, are very effective indeed. The interior of the sub is an appropriately creepy and claustrophobic place, and details like the slight swinging of the lamp in the captain’s office remind us that we’re at sea. The miniature sub surfacing, with water pouring off it, looks lovely. The giant squid that passes by them un-noticed in the dark is my favourite ‘creature’ moment.
Unfortunately, there’s also stuff that sucks. What ought to be the ‘action’ sequences are just a bunch of guys in very similar jackets and sweaters punching each other in the fog, and you can’t tell who’s who or which side is winning. The conversation between the captain and Dr. Clayton attempts to make the point that when your country’s at war it’s impossible to ‘stay out of it’ no matter how much of a pacifist you, personally, may be, but it’s too heavy-handed to work properly… though I do like how the two of them are able to bond over a shared interest in biology. I have no idea what happened in the tunnel that damaged the submarine, because the exterior shots are just blackness with a few rocks.
Then we hit the dinosaurs. These are honestly fairly impressive for the time the film was made. We don’t get a good first impression, as the first ones we get a good look at are three completely stiff pterodactyls circling like they’re hanging from a baby’s mobile. The rest are puppets, stop motion, and animatronics, and the people who decided which technique to use for which shot had a good grasp of what each is best at. The greenscreen work is sometimes crummy but there are some lovely matte paintings, and for the most part the effects here are good enough to tell the story without being distracting. There’s even some attempt to portray the dinosaurs as animals with behaviours, rather than monsters that exist only to menace the humans.
So I actually have quite a bit of praise for this movie. That’s not what my blog is about, though. This blog is about movies that suck, so let’s look at the bad parts of The Land that Time Forgot.
Well, there’s the standard stuff. The day-for-night is bright enough that it was obviously shot in the daytime while still being dark enough that you can’t tell what’s going on. The human inhabitants of Caprona are stupid cartoon Neanderthals with dark makeup on their faces but not their arms and legs, who become whiter and whiter as they move up the evolutionary scale. The motion of the dinosaurs may be pretty good but the design of them is ugly and lumpy, with far too many teeth even on the herbivores. This is partly because we didn’t know nearly as much about dinosaurs in the seventies, but the movie’s fat carnosaurs with their lizard-like heads would have been ugly and inaccurate in the thirties. Compare them, for example, to Charles R. Knight’s Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops from freaking 1927.
Many ‘lost world’ scenarios will simply present us with t-rex fighting a saber-toothed tiger and expect us not to question it. The Land that Time Forgot gives us an reason of sorts for its mixing of geological eras, but not one that makes any sense. From Om’s conviction that he will become a ‘Stolu’ and Dr. Clayton’s explanation of what’s going on in the giant coconut hot tub, we gather that each individual organism on Caprona evolves from a single cell to a complex being, following the entire history of its species’ evolution. This appears to have been inspired by the fact that embryos ‘evolve’ as they develop, going through phases in which they have things like gills before losing them. The phenomenon, called 'recapitulation', was considered one of the original pieces of evidence for evolution and I guess I can accept how they use it here. The problem is that the movie refuses to state it clearly, which gives the impression that the writers were kind of embarrassed by the idea.
The biggest problem with two-thirds of The Land that Time Forgot is that once the characters reach Caprona, the story more or less comes to a screeching halt. The parts set on the submarine were quite tightly-focused. Now we are technically still seeing the same story, as they try to find fuel in order to get them back to civilization, but we also stop for long sequences of people climbing hills and dinosaurs wandering around in the dark, or pointless arguments between the British and German sailors. In a dinosaur movie we obviously need a little bit of people standing around going oooooh and aaaaah, but they go about it all wrong here.
Then there’s the ending, which quite literally destroys everything we’ve seen so far. The characters are on the verge of saving the damsel in distress, escaping the island, and celebrating the power of international cooperation, and then at the last minute the volcano erupts and it all goes to hell. A volcano erupting at the end of a movie that is not about a volcano erupting will always be a deus ex machina, because there’s nothing characters can do to cause or prevent it – it’s never anything but a coincidence. The need to escape prompts the Germans to turn on the British and try to leave without Dr. Clayton and Doug McClure, and their karmic punishment is to be cooked to death by volcanic gases in their own submarine. Clayton and McClure are left behind on the shore while everything around them catches fire. This doesn’t feel like a conclusion to the story we’ve just seen. It feels more like somebody just really hates happy endings, and ripped one out from under us at the last moment.
There are a few things in this movie that could have counted as thematic material if anyone had cared, but nothing is ever done with any of them. Om is a ‘bolu’, a lower order of cavemen, and he never seems to notice Dr. Clayton, nor do the slightly higher ‘stolu’. It is the ‘golu’, the most human-like of them all, who attempt to kidnap and rape her. I doubt this was an attempt to say anything about human nature. It seems to have been done that way just because it wasn’t yet time for Dr. Clayton to be in peril until the climax of the film.
Likewise, Jonah and the bots comment on the fact that this is a movie about Europeans coming to a new country, shooting the inhabitants, and generally making a mess as they search for petroleum. Within the story this is not a colonial urge, as the characters have no plans to settle, but a matter of life and death, and again it seems like nobody thought very deeply about it. It was just a thing that needed to happen to make the plot work.
Enough went right in this movie that the things which went wrong really do become a terrible shame. A great deal of effort seems to have gone into just about everything, but a few poor writing choices mean that the result is not very good, yet not bad enough to be enjoyed on that level either. If I were contemplating this as a potential Episode that Never Was, I honestly think I would have decided against it. It just doesn’t have the kind of personality I associate with a good MST3K movie.
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Almost a books worth of love quotes
I love love quotes. They are so romantic and soul crushing when you don’t believe in the concept of love. It’s such bittersweet bliss. I have so many. Without further ado, lets dive in!
01.) “True love it like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen” ~ Francois De Le Rochefoucauld
02.) “You call my name, I come to you in pieces, So you can make me whole” ~Red, Pieces
03.) “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you” ~ Winnie The Pooh, A. A. Milne
04.) “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” ~The Princess Bride
05.) “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depths and breath and height my soul can reach, When feeling out of sight for the ends of being and idea grace. I love thee to the level of everyday’s candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with a passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints, I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death” ~Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
06.) “We have three kinds of family. Those we are born to, those who are born to us, and those we let into our hearts” ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, Bad Moon Rising
07.) “To get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with” ~Mark Twain
08.) “I was hiding under your porch because I love you” ~Doug, Up
09.) “The sun may set and the moon may wane, but my love for you remains ever constant. I am, and always will be yours... Forever.” ~Fairy Fencer F
10.) “Deep in my soul I know that I’m your destiny” ~Mulan
11.) “To face the future with another who means more than any other is to be loved” ~The Rescuers
12.) “I have found my star. She is beauty and grace. Elegance and goodness. My laughter in winter. She is courageous and strong. Bold and tempting. Unlike any other in all the universe” ~Sherrylin Kenyon, Dance With The Devil
13.) “My dream wouldn’t be complete without you in it” ~The princess and the frog
14.) “If I had a brush right now, I’d paint you all around me” ~Single File, Laura
15.) “When I look at you, I can feel it. I look at you and I’m home” ~Dory, Finding Nemo
16.) “You are my greatest adventure” ~The Incredibles
17.) “Love is... Putting someone else’s dreams before your own” ~Olaf, Frozen
18.) “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (ESV)
19.) “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” ~Roald Dahl, The Witches
20.) “I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream” ~Sleeping Beauty
21.) “We are most alive when we’re in love” ~John Updike
22.) “True love stories never have an ending” ~Richard Bach
23.) “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies” ~Aristotle
24.) “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other” ~Audrey Hepburn
25.) “Love always cures people, both the ones who give it, and the ones who receive it” ~Karl Menninger
26.) “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet” ~Plato
27.) “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person” ~ Mighon McLaughlin
28.) “To know when to go away and when to come closer is the key to any lasting relationship” ~Domenico Cieri Estrada
29.) “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction” ~Antoine De Saint-Exupĕcy
30.) “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” ~ Victor Hugo
31.) “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.” ~Michel de Montaigne
32.) “We loved with a love that was more than love.” ~Edgar Allan Poe
33.) “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” ~Victor Hugo
34.) “To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I’.” ~Ayn Rand
35.) “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” ~Victor Hugo
36.) “If I were a zombie, I’d never eat your brain. I’d just want your heart, yeah want your heart, just want your heart” ~Stephanie Mabey, The Zombie Song
37.) “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No … don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!” ~ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
38.) “In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ~Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
39.) “You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.” ~The White Company, Arthur Conan Doyle
40.) “ Just like nicotine, Heroine, Morphine, Suddenly, I'm a fiend and you're all I need, All I need, yeah, you're all I need” ~Never Be the Same, Camila Cabello
41.) “ You've already won me over in spite of me, And don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet, And don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are” ~Head Over Feet, Alanis Morissette
42.) “ Just for a second with you, the highest mountain I'd climb, every time that I see you, each moment feels so sublime “ ~xXVVSOSVVXx
43.) “ Oh just to be with you is having the best day of my life “ ~Thank You, Dido
44.) “We’ve loved each other so long I’ve never been a man and not loved her.” ~The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
45.) “You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling.” ~The Miniaturist, Jessie Burton
46.) “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.” ~Hamlet, William Shakespeare
47.) “I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees but to be quite upfront and completely truthful you make my body forget it has knees at all.” ~Love Language, Chasers of the Light, Tyler Knott Gregson
48.) “Love starts as a feeling, but to continue is a choice. And I find myself choosing you, more and more every day.” ~Bending The Universe, Justin Wetch
49.) “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” ~Oscar Wilde
50.) "Baby it's you. You're the one I love, You're the one I need, You're the only one I see." ~Love On Top, Beyoncé
51.) "Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while." ~Princess Bride
52.) “I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world.” ~Arwen, Lord of the Rings
53.) “…love is not a constantly stable factor, it’s a decision you’ll have to make again and again.” ~Black Panther
54.) “My love for you is a puzzle…for which I have no answers.” ~Padmé, Star Wars
55.) “We’re like changing electric and magnetic fields; you can’t have one, without the other.” ~Howard Wolowitz, Big Bang Theory
56.) “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” ~Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (interesting enough this is also Matthew 6:21)
57.) “You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” ~Dr. Seuss
58.) “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.” ~Neil Gaiman, Stardust
59.) “Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.” ~Albert Einstein
60.) “No matter what has happened. No matter what you’ve done. No matter what you will do. I will always love you. I swear it.” ~ Defiance, C.J. Redwine
61.) “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” ~Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
62.) “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.” ~Nicholas Sparks
63.) “Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.” ~Ray Bradbury
64.) Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” ~James Baldwin
65.) Who, being loved, is poor?” ~Oscar Wilde
66.) “I love you the way a drowning man loves air. And it would destroy me to have you just a little.” ~The Crown of Embers, Rae Carson
67.) “Sometimes I can’t see myself when I’m with you. I can only just see you” ~Tiger Lily, Jodi Lynn Anderson
68.) “I knew the second I met you that there was something about you I needed. Turns out it wasn’t something about you at all. It was just you." ~Beautiful Disaster, Jamie McGuire
69.) “I want everyone to meet you. You’re my favorite person of all time.” ~Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell
70.) “If my love were an ocean, there would be no more land. If my love were a desert, you would see only sand. If my love were a star–late at night, only light. And if my love could grow wings, I’d be soaring in flight.” ~Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher
71.) “There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.” ~The Truth About Forever, Sarah Dessen
72.) “And I’ve realized that the Beatles got it wrong. Love isn’t all we need—love is all there is.” ~Second Chance Summer, Morgan Matson
73.) “ You are the morning sun, shining on my face, when I am with you my life falls into place, you are the glittering stars, beaming so bright, you cuddle me always, all through the night, you are the wind blowing by, brushing my hair, No matter where you go, I'll always be there “ ~xXVVSOSVVXx
74.) “ You're always in my heart, From early in the mornin' til it's dark, I gotta see your sweet, sweet smile everyday” ~Sweet Sweet Smile, Carpenters
75.) “No matter where I went, I always knew my way back to you. You are my compass star.” ~For Darkness Shows the Stars, Diana Peterfreund
76.) “We accept the love we think we deserve.” ~Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
77.) “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche
78.) “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” ~Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
79.) “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ~Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
80.) “You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect—you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break—her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there.” ~Bob Marley
81.) “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” ~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
82.) “You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.” ~Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
83.) “We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.” ~Robert Fulghum, True Love
84.) “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.” ~Alfred Tennyson
85.) “When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.” ~Jess C. Scott, The Intern
86.) “ But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.” ~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
87.) “And now I’m looking at you,and you’re asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before – bits of myself to the Lightwoods, to Isabelle and Alec, but it took years to do it – but, Clary, since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me.” ~Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
88.) “A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other...Maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever” ~Dave Matthews Band
89.) “They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” ~Tom Bodett
90.) “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
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Chinese Artificial Intelligence vs US Artificial Intelligence
http://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-The-Question-of-Comparative-Advantage-in-Artificial-Intelligence-1.pdf
....Since Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE were added to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List,15 China’s determination to pursue indigenous innovation has only intensified.16
In cases where the United States has stymied Chinese advances with unilateral export controls but substitute options remain available, China has typically managed to find workarounds or substitute components within a short timeframe.17 The challenge will be for China to replicate core innovations in semiconductor technology where no comparable substitute exists.
China’s model of development through state subsidies appears ill-suited for the semiconductor industry, which is fast moving and requires both business acumen and sizable technical expertise.18 Nearly 20 years after PRC science and technology leaders set out to develop a competitor to the x86 processor, Chinese alternatives remain limited and significantly behind U.S. counterparts. State-led pushes in the 1990s to establish a foothold in the chip fabrication market failed to produce commercially viable firms capable of keeping up with foreign leaders. China’s most successful fab, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), kept PRC’s S&T officials at arm’s length during its early development.19 The current state drive, led by the
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 7
National Integrated Circuit Fund, attempts to learn from prior mistakes and introduces more market mechanisms than in the past. However, many experts are skeptical that this state-led push will be sufficient to wean China off foreign chips.20
Regardless of the Chinese model’s efficiency, the reality is that China is building its manufacturing capacity to compete in semiconductors as the United States loses indigenous capability and outsources semiconductor manufacturing to foundries elsewhere.21 Technological trends may also play out in China’s favor. As Moore’s Law reaches its end, squeezing additional computing power out of chips will require new materials and specialized AI chip architectures.22 The United States enjoys a dominant market share in leading-edge GPU (Graphics Processing Units) and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) design, as well as many of the top AI-relevant ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). For the time being, China’s leading AI chip designs often incorporate U.S. and allied designs. Yet as technological progress slows and evolves, China may have an easier time catching up.
Chinese players are starting to break into the AI chip space on some fronts. China’s AI chip unicorns Cambricon and Horizon Robotics, for example, have attained multi-billion-dollar valuations within just a few years.23 Huawei has launched its own AI chip, Ascend 910, designed to process efficiently the massive amounts of data often required to train algorithms.24 Alibaba has also created a new AI chip, known as the Hanguang 800, which it claims possesses the computing capabilities of 10 GPUs.25 Alibaba’s chip subsidiary Pingtouge (平头哥) open-sourced its microcontroller design platform on GitHub in order to make chip design more accessible.26 So far, however, PRC AI chips have primarily achieved successes in “inference,” the process of running existing neural networks; the process of training continues to rely primarily on GPUs produced by NVIDIA.27 Whether Chinese companies like Huawei can compete with NVIDIA in the AI training space remains to be seen.
Endnotes
1 K. A. Konrad, “Dynamic Contests and the Discouragement Effect,” Revue d'Économie Politique (2012); C. Harris and J. Vickers, “Racing with Uncertainty,” Review of Economic Studies 54, 1 (1987); I. K. Wang, L. Qian, and M. Lehrer, “From Technology Race to Technology Marathon: A Behavioral Explanation of Technology Advancement,” European Management Journal 35, Issue 2 (April 2017): 187-197.
2 This policy brief is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather proposes a framework for assessing relevant data and measures that bear on current debates in AI. We are indebted to the robust research and existing literature in the field. See, e.g., Michael C. Horowitz, Gregory Allen, Elsa Kania, and Paul Scharre, “Strategic Competition in an Era of Artificial Intelligence,” Center for a New American Security, July 2018, 8.
3 Deborah J. Jackson, “What is an innovation ecosystem,” National Science Foundation, 1, 2011. On AI in particular, see “AI is a national security priority — here’s how we cultivate it,” The Hill, February 20, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/430765-ai-is-a- national-security-priority-heres-how-we-cultivate-it; For another excellent evaluation of the importance of the overall ecosystem to AI development, see: Lindsey R. Sheppard and Andrew Philip Hunter, “Artificial Intelligence and National Security: The Importance of the AI Ecosystem,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 5, 2018,https://www.csis.org/analysis/artificial-intelligence-and-national-security-importance-ai- ecosystem.
4 Andrew Imbrie, “Mapping the Terrain: AI Governance and the Future of Power,” Survival (blog), December 17, 2019, https://www.iiss.org/blogs/survival- blog/2019/12/mapping-the-terrain-ai-governance.
5 See, e.g., Andrew Imbrie, “Artificial Intelligence Meets Bureaucratic Politics,” War on the Rocks, August 1, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/artificial-intelligence-meets- bureaucratic-politics/; Michael C. Horowitz and Lauren Kahn, “The AI Literacy Gap Hobbling American Officialdom,” War on the Rocks, January 14, 2020,https://warontherocks.com/2020/01/the-ai-literacy-gap-hobbling-american- officialdom/.
6 “Winning the Future: A Blueprint for Sustained U.S. Leadership in Semiconductor Technology,” Semiconductor Industry Association, April 2019,https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FINAL-SIA-Blueprint- for-web.pdf.
7 We define “AI chips” to include GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array), and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) specialized for high speed and efficiency for AI algorithms, among others.
8 See, e.g., “Re: ANPRM on Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies (BIS- 2018-0024),” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, January 10, 2019,https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-01-10-Dept-of-Commerce-GU-
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 36
CSET-ANPRM-on-Export-Controls-for-AI.pdf. For a recent example, see Alexandra Alper, Toby Sterling, and Stephen Nellis, “Trump Administration pressed Dutch hard to cancel China chip-equipment sale: sources,” Reuters, January 6, 2020,https://www.reuters.com/article/asml-holding-usa-china/rpt-insight-trump-administration- pressed-dutch-hard-to-cancel-china-chip-equipment-sale-sources-idUSL1N29802U.
9 “Trade war forces Chinese chipmaker Fujian Jinhua to halt output,” Financial Times, January, 28, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/87b5580c-22bf-11e9-8ce6- 5db4543da632.
10 For one prominent example, see the case of Fujian Jinhua. Paul Mozur, “Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power,” New York Times, June 22, 2018,https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/technology/china-micron-chips-theft.html.
11 Some U.S. firms made the move abroad in response to export controls. See “U.S.-based chip-tech group moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears,” Reuters, November 28, 2019,https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-insight/u-s-based-chip- tech-group-moving-to-switzerland-over-trade-curb-fears-idUSKBN1XZ16L.
12 Chris Gillis, “US exporters attempt to head off new content restrictions,” American Shipper, December 9, 2019, https://www.freightwaves.com/news/us-exporters-attempt-to-head- off-new-content-restrictions.
13 Timothy P. Morgan, “Huawei Jumps into the Arms Server Chip Fray,” The Next Platform, January 8, 2019. See also Saif Khan, “Maintaining the AI Chip Advantage of the United States and its Allies,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, December 2019,https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Maintaining-the-AI-Chip- Competitive-Advantage-of-the-United-States-and-its-Allies-20191206.pdf.
14 “Winning the Future: A Blueprint for Sustained U.S. Leadership in Semiconductor Technology,” Semiconductor Industry Association, April 2019,https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FINAL-SIA-Blueprint- for-web.pdf.
15 ZTE was later removed from this list. “BIS Adds ZTE Corporation and Three Affiliated Entities to the Entity List,” Bureau of Industry and Security, Department of Commerce,https://bis.doc.gov/index.php/oee/9-bis/carousel/1011-bis-adds-zte-corporation-and- three-affiliated-entities-to-the-entity-list; “China’s Huawei, 70 affiliates placed on U.S. trade blacklist,” Reuters, May 15, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china- huaweitech/chinas-huawei-70-affiliates-placed-on-us-trade-blacklist-idUSKCN1SL2W4.
16 Lorand Laskai, “Why Blacklisting Huawei Could Backfire,” Foreign Affairs, June 19, 2019,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-06-19/why-blacklisting-huawei- could-backfire.
17 Jason Matheny and Carrick Flynn, “ANPRM on Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, January 10, 2019,
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 37
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JDDQaWlU- u90VAl6h9sdQb_c_7EB9ftrYDOEqu12nEk/edit.
18
19 Doug Fuller, Paper Tigers, Hidden Dragons: Firms and Political Economy of China’s Technological Development (Oxford University Press, 2016), 131.
20 Junko Yoshida, “China Must Go Beyond Big Fund,” EE Times, November 11, 2019,https://www.eetimes.com/china-must-go-beyond-big-fund/#.
21 “The Decline in Semiconductor Manufacturing in the United States,” Center for Public Policy Innovation, June 2010, https://www.cppionline.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/07/The-Decline-of-Semiconductor-Manufacturing.pdf.
22 Will Knight, “China has never had a real chip industry. Making AI chips could change that,” MIT Technology Review, December 14, 2018,https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612569/china-has-never-had-a-real-chip- industry-making-ai-chips-could-change-that/.
23 While valuations are likely inflated due in part to the influence of state-driven investments, these start-ups have achieved notable progress nonetheless. “Chinese AI chip maker Horizon Robotics raises $600 million from SK Hynix, others,” Reuters, February 27, 2019,https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-tech-semiconductors/chinese-ai-chip-maker- horizon-robotics-raises-600-million-from-sk-hynix-others-idUSKCN1QG0HW.
24 Dan Strumpf, “Huawei Launches AI Chip in Push to Unseat U.S. Makers,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-launches-ai-chip-in-push- to-unseat-u-s-makers-11566556836.
25 “Alibaba’s New AI Chip Can Process Nearly 80K Images Per Second,” Synced, September 25, 2019, https://syncedreview.com/2019/09/25/alibabas-new-ai-chip- can-process-nearly-80k-images-per-second/.
Arjun Kharpal, “Alibaba unveils its first A.I. chip as China pushes for its own semiconductor technology,” CNBC, September 25, 2019,https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/alibaba-unveils-its-first-ai-chip-called-the- hanguang-800.html.
26 “Alibaba Open-Sources Its MCU to Boost AI Research,” Synced, October 23, 2019,
https://syncedreview.com/2019/10/23/alibaba-open-sources-its-mcu-to-boost-ai- research/.
27 Lorand Laskai and Helen Toner, “Can China Grow Its Own AI Tech Base?”, DigiChina, November 4, 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity- initiative/digichina/blog/can-china-grow-its-own-ai-tech-base/.
On the obstacles to indigenizing a semiconductor industry in China, see Douglas B. Fuller,
“Growth, Upgrading, and Limited Catch-up in China’s Semiconductor Industry,” in Loren
Brandt and Thomas G. Rawski, eds., Policy, Regulation and Innovation in China’s Electricity
and Telecom Industries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 38
28 See, e.g., Data.gov, https://www.data.gov/open-gov/; “Project Open Data,” https://project-open-data.cio.gov.
29
30 Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6.
31 Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (New York: Random House Audio, 2018).
32 Theresa Hitchens, “U.S. Military Needs Better Data on Itself to Exploit AI,” Breaking Defense, December 12, 2019, https://breakingdefense.com/2019/12/us-military-needs- better-data-on-itself-to-exploit-ai/.
33 Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., “EXCLUSIVE Pentagon’s AI Problem Is ‘Dirty’ Data: Lt. Gen. Shanahan,” Breaking Defense, November 13, 2019,https://breakingdefense.com/2019/11/exclusive-pentagons-ai-problem-is-dirty-data-lt- gen-shanahan/.
34 “The New Racetrack for Artificial Intelligence: China-U.S. Competition” [人工智能新赛场 -中美对比], CCID, May 2017.
35 For an instructive framework on this issue, see Matt Sheehan, “Much Ado About Data: How America and China Stack Up,” MacroPolo, July 16, 2019,https://macropolo.org/ai-data-us-china/.
36 Celia Chen and Iris Deng, “Tencent seeks to kill silo culture that gave it WeChat as it expands into AI, big data,” South China Morning Post, November 14, 2018,https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/2172967/tencent-seeks-kill-silo- culture-gave-it-wechat-it-expands-ai-big.
37 Emily Feng, “In China, A New Call To Protect Data Privacy,” NPR, January 5, 2020,
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/05/793014617/in-china-a-new-call-to-protect-data- privacy.
38 “Navigating China’s Data Maze: How Regulations Affect U.S. Companies,” The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, May 2019, https://www.amcham- shanghai.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Viewpoint%20- %20Data%20%28May%202019%29.pdf.
39 “Interpretation of the Work Plan on Promoting the Development of the Artificial Intelligence Industry through the Opening of Public Data” [关于通过公共数据开放促进人工智能 产 业发展的工作方案》政策解读], November 4, 2019,http://jxj.beijing.gov.cn/zcjd/zcjdlb/201912/t20191212_1088931.html.
Based on analysis of monthly user data of most valuable U.S. and Chinese tech
companies.
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 39
40 For a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that big data presents for defense mobilization, see Li Ching [李庆], “Looking at the National Defense Mobilization Big Data Construction” [冷眼看国防动员大数据建设], China National Defense News [中国国防报], October 24, 2018, http://www.qstheory.cn/defense/2018- 10/24/c_1123606679.htm.
41 “China Tech Talk 76: US vs China—AI asymmetries with Jeffrey Ding,” technode, April 16, 2019, https://technode.com/2019/04/16/china-tech-talk-76-us-vs-china-ai- asymmetries-with-jeffrey-ding/.
42 “Artificial Intelligence Index: 2019 Annual Report,”https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj10986/f/ai_index_2019_report.pdf.
43 Ibid., 18.44
45 Noam Brown and Tuomas Sandholm, “Superhuman AI for heads-up no-limit poker: Libratus beats top professionals,” Science 359, no. 6374 (2018): 418-424. Alan Blair and Abdallah Saffidine, “AI surpasses humans at six-player poker,” Science 365, no. 6456 (2019): 864-865.
46 Raymond Perrault, Yoav Shoham, Erik Brynjolfsson, Jack Clark, John Etchemendy, Barbara Grosz, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Saurabh Mishra, and Juan Carlos Niebles, “The AI Index 2019 Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Human-Centered AI Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, December 2019; Laskai and Toner, “Can China Grow Its Own AI Tech Base.”
47 Field Cady and Oren Etzione, “China May Overtake the US in AI Research,” Medium, March 13, 2019, https://medium.com/ai2-blog/china-to-overtake-us-in-ai-research- 8b6b1fe30595.
48 Karen White, “Publications Output: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons,” Science & Engineering Indicators, December 17, 2019, https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20206.
49 “The China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategic Research Academy released two heavyweight reports” [中国新一代人工智能发展战略研究院发 布两份重量级报告], Interface news [界面新闻], May 18, 2019,https://xw.qq.com/partner/wcsbzst/20190518A0EB05/20190518A0EB0500?ADTA G=undefined&pgv_ref=undefined.
50 China accounts for 17 of the top 20 academic institutions that have been involved in patenting AI, with particular strength in deep learning, according to a study from the World Intellectual Property Organization. See “WIPO’s First ‘Technology Trends’ Study Probes
David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, Arthur
Guez, Marc Lanctot et al., “A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess,
shogi, and Go through self-play,” Science 362, no. 6419 (2018): 1140-1144.
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 40
Artificial Intelligence: IBM and Microsoft are Leaders Amid Recent Global Upsurge in AI Inventive Activity,” World Intellectual Property Organization,https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2019/article_0001.html; “WIPO Technology Trends 2019, Artificial Intelligence,” World Intellectual Property Organization,https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_1055.pdf.
51 Sarah O’Meara, “Will China Lead the World in AI by 2030,” Nature, August 21, 2019,https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02360-7.
52 “Robust Vision Challenge,”http://www.robustvision.net/leaderboard.php?benchmark=stereo.
53 Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Yukun Li, Shikun Feng, Xuyi Chen, Han Zhang, Xin Tian, Danxiang Zhu, Hao Tian, and Hua Wu, “ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.09223 (2019).
54 “Baidu’s Pre-training Model ERNIE Achieves New NLP Benchmark Record,” Synced, December 11, 2019, https://syncedreview.com/2019/12/11/baidus-pre-training- model-ernie-achieves-new-nlp-benchmark-record/.
55 See, e.g., “Global AI Talent Report 2019,” jfgagne, https://jfgagne.ai/talent-2019/.
56 “AAAI-17 Accepted Papers,”http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2017/aaai17accepted-papers.pdf; Sarah Zhang, “China’s Artificial-Intelligence Boom,” The Atlantic, February 16, 2017,https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china-artificial- intelligence/516615/.
57 “Artificial Intelligence Index,” 87,https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj10986/f/ai_index_2019_report.pdf.
58 Remco Zwetsloot, Roxanne Heston, and Zachary Arnold, “Strengthening the U.S. AI Workforce,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, September 2019,https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET_US_AI_Workforce.pdf.
59 Remco Zwetsloot, James Dunham, Zachary Arnold, and Tina Huang, “Keeping Top Talent in the United States: Findings and Policy Options for International Graduate Student Retention,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp- content/uploads/Keeping-Top-AI-Talent-in-the-United-States.pdf.
60 Ibid.
61 Elias G. Carayannis and David FJ Campbell, eds., Knowledge Creation, Diffusion, and Use in Innovation Networks and Knowledge Clusters: A Comparative Systems Approach Across the United States, Europe, and Asia (Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006); “Rapid Rise of China’s STEM Workforce Charted by National Science Board Report,” American Institute of Physics, January 31, 2018.
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 41
62 Wang Cong, “AI race shifts to talent in battle for dominance,” Global Times, March 19, 2019, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1142700.shtml.
63 “The China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategic Research Academy released two heavyweight reports” [中国新一代人工智能发展战略研究院发 布两份重量级报告], Interface News [界面新闻], May 18, 2019,https://xw.qq.com/partner/wcsbzst/20190518A0EB05/20190518A0EB0500?ADTA G=undefined&pgv_ref=undefined.
64 Zwetsloot, Dunham, Arnold, and Huang, “Keeping Top Talent in the United States.”
65 China Institute for Science and Technology Policy at Tsinghua University, “China AI Development Report 2018,” Tsinghua University, July 2018,http://www.sppm.tsinghua.edu.cn/eWebEditor/UploadFile/China_AI_development_repo rt_2018.pdf.
66 Ibid.
67 Joy D. Ma, “China’s AI Talent Base Is Growing, and then Leaving,” MacroPolo, July 30, 2019, https://macropolo.org/chinas-ai-talent-base-is-growing-and-then-leaving/. By one initial estimate, of the 12,500 AI graduates from Chinese universities to date, reportedly only 31 percent have stayed in China, whereas 62 percent instead departed to the United States. Wang Cong, “AI race shifts to talent in battle for dominance,” Global Times, March 19, 2019, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1142700.shtml.
68 Ministry of Education, “Artificial Intelligence Innovation Action Plan for Institutions of Higher Learning” [高等学校人工智能创新行动计划], April 4, 2018,http://www.moe.edu.cn/srcsite/A16/s7062/201804/t20180410_332722.html. For commentary on the topic, see Elsa Kania, “China’s AI talent ‘arms race,” The Strategist, April 23, 2018, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinas-ai-talent-arms-race/.
69 “This year, colleges and universities have added these specialties: artificial intelligence and big data are the hottest” [今年高校新增这些专业:人工智能与大数据最火], June 12, 2019, http://edu.sina.com.cn/gaokao/2019-06-12/doc-ihvhiews8390284.shtml.
70 “Cross National Comparisons of R&D Performance,” National Science Board,
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/research-and- development-u-s-trends-and-international-comparisons/cross-national-comparisons-of-r-d- performance.
71 “2016–2019 Progress Report: Advancing Artificial Intelligence R&D,” November 2019,
https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/AI-Research-and-Development-Progress-Report-2016- 2019.pdf; Melissa Flagg, “America’s Future Lies in Technical Alliances,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology (blog), January 8, 2020,https://cset.georgetown.edu/2020/01/08/americas-future-lies-in-technical-alliances/.
72 “National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence,” Interim Report, November 2019,https://www.nscai.gov/about/reports-to-congress.
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 42
73 Ibid.
74 MIT Committee to Evaluate the Innovation Deficit, “The Future Postponed: Why Declining Investment in Basic Research Threatens a U.S. Innovation Deficit,” April 2015,https://dc.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Future%20Postponed.pdf.
75 Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, Jump-starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
76 Charlotte Yang, “Chart of the Day: Another Record Year for China R&D Spending, Caixin, October 10, 2018, https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-10-10/chart-of-the-day- another-record-year-for-china-rd-spending-101333479.html. See also “Is China a global leader in research and development,” China Power, https://chinapower.csis.org/china- research-and-development-rnd/l; Dennis Normile, “China narrows U.S. lead in R&D spending,” Science, October 19, 2018,https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6412/276.
77 “China’s R&D expenditure is close to two trillion yuan. Which cities have more research investment?” [中国研发经费接近两万亿，哪些城市科研投入多?], CCTV, September 13, 2019,http://news.cctv.com/2019/09/13/ARTIwBtFsNMhTHQ8DXpFQHJR190913.shtml.
78 Teddy Ng and Jane Cai, “China’s funding for science and research to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2019,” South China Morning Post, March 10, 2019,https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2189427/chinas-funding-science- and-research-reach-25-cent-gdp-2019.
79 “Atlas of national key R & D plan funding allocation” [国家重点研发计划经费分配图谱 浮现], Economic Reference [经济参考报], October 14, 2019,http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2019-10/14/c_1125100297.htm.
80 Ashwin Acharya and Zachary Arnold, “Chinese Public AI R&D Spending: Provisional Findings,” CSET Issue Brief, December 2019, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp- content/uploads/Chinese-Public-AI-RD-Spending-Provisional-Findings-2.pdf.
81 For instance, i
“Tianjin established a new generation of artificial intelligence industry fund with a scale of 100 billion RMB” [天津设新一代人工智
能产业基金，规模为1000亿人民币], May 16, 2018,https://m.pedaily.cn/news/431332.
82 “The National “863” Plan Computer Subject’s Thirty-Year Anniversary: Leapfrog-Style Development and the Realm of Necessity” [
n May 2018, the city of Tianjin announced the New Generation Artificial
Intelligence Industry Fund, which amounts to 100 billion RMB ($16 billion), based on a
combination of state and venture capital funding.
国家“863”计划计算机主题30年拾遗:跨
越式发展与必然王国], Science Net, February 8, 2017,
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 43
“863 Plan” [
83 Ibid. “863 Plan” [
84 “Our Nation Launched Four Major Science Research Programs” [我国启动四项重大科
学研究计划], Science and Technology Daily, November 16, 2006.
85 “The national key R&D plan for next year is basically determined! These industries are the most noteworthy” [国家明年重点研发计划基本确定!这几个产业最值得关注], October 28, 2019.
86 “National Medium and Long Term Science and Technology Development Plan Outline” (2006-2020) [国家中长期科学和技术发展规划纲要], Ministry of Science and Technology, February 9, 2006,http://www.most.gov.cn/mostinfo/xinxifenlei/gjkjgh/200811/t20081129_65774_9.ht m.
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU- D/Cybersecurity/Documents/National_Strategies_Repository/China_2006.pdf.
87 See estimates from the Allen Institute.
88 “2021-2035 National Medium- and Long-term Scientific and Technological Development Plan Basic Science Development Strategy Research Project Launched in Beijing” [2021- 2035年国家中长期科技发展规划基础科学发展战略研究专题在京启动], Ministry of Science and Technology Website, May 3, 2019, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019- 05/03/content_5388386.htm.
89 Elsa B. Kania, “Battlefield Singularity: Artificial Intelligence, Military Revolution, and China’s Future Military Power,” Center for a New American Security, November 28, 2017,https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/battlefield-singularity-artificial-intelligence- military-revolution-and-chinas-future-military-power.
90 Jeffrey Ding, “Deciphering China’s AI Dream,” Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, March 2018, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_AI-Dream.pdf.
91 “State Council Notice on the Issuance of the New Generation AI Development Plan” [国 务院关于印发新一代人工智能发展规划的通知]. “MIIT’s Notice Regarding the Release of the Three Year Action Plan to Promote the Development of New-Generation Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018-2020) [工业和信息化部关于印发《促进新一代人工智能产 业发展三年行动计划(2018-2020年)》的通], December 14, 2017,http://www.miit.gov.cn/n1146295/n1652858/n1652930/n3757016/c5960820/co ntent.html.
For an English translation of this plan, see Paul Triolo, Elsa Kania, and Graham Webster (translators), “Translation: Chinese government outlines AI ambitions through 2020,”
http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2017/2/367416.shtm. See also
计划], China Education and Research Network, http://www.edu.cn/html/rd/b/bls.shtml.
See also
http://www.edu.cn/html/rd/b/bls.shtml.
863计划], China Education and Research Network,
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 44
863
DigiChina, https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity- initiative/digichina/blog/translation-chinese-government-outlines-ai-ambitions-through- 2020/.
92 “Ministry of Science and Technology Notice Regarding the Issuance of National Key R&D Plan Transformative Technologies and Crux Scientific Problems Key Topic 2017 Program Application Guidelines” [科技部关于发布国家重点研发计划变革性技术关键科学问题 重点专项2017年度项目申报指南的通知], Ministry of Science and Technology, September 27, 2017,http://www.most.gov.cn/mostinfo/xinxifenlei/fgzc/gfxwj/gfxwj2017/201710/t20171 009_135224.htm.
93 There might be some debate about the best translations for the terms “重大工程” and“重大项目,” each of which could be rendered major/mega project/program. See National Development and Reform Commission Office Releases Notice Regarding the Implementation of the 2018 “Internet Plus,” Artificial Intelligence Innovation Development, and Digital Economy Experimental Mega-Project Notice [国家发展改革委办公厅关于组 织实施2018年“互联网+”、人工智能创新发展和数字经济试点重大工程的通知], National Development and Reform Commission, October 11, 2017,http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/zcfb/zcfbtz/201710/t20171013_863534.html.
94 “AI Innovation and Development Major Project Application Requirements” [人工智能创 新发展重大工程申报要求], NDRC, October 11, 2017,http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/zcfb/zcfbtz/201710/W020171013599553259770.pdf.
95 “56 projects selected as major projects for the ‘Internet Plus,’ Artificial Intelligence Innovation Development and Digital Economy Pilot Megaprojects” [56个项目入选“互联 网+”、人工智能创新发展和数字经济试点重大工程], January 22, 2018, Xinhua,http://www.gov.cn/guowuyuan/2018-01/22/content_5259438.htm.
96 “State Council Notice on the Issuance of the New Generation AI Development Plan” [国 务院关于印发新一代人工智能发展规划的通知].
97 For examples, see “SDIC’s National Emerging Industry Venture Capital Guidance Fund raised a total of 17.85 billion yuan” [国投创合国家新兴产业创业投资引导基金募集规 模达178.5亿元], May 10, 2017,https://www.sdic.com.cn/cn/zxzx/gsyw/2017/06/09/webinfo/phone14959552641 37396.htm.
“Guohua Military-Civil Fusion Industrial Development Fund Established” [国华军民融合产 业发展基金创立],National Defense Science and Industry Bureau, September 7,
2016, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-09/07/content_5106111.htm.
98 Paul Triolo, “AI in China: Cutting Through the Hype,” Eurasia Group, December 6, 2017,https://www.eurasiagroup.net/live-post/ai-in-china-cutting-through-the-hype.
99 See the Party’s report from the fourth plenum: “Communiqué of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” [中国共产党第十九届中
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央委员会第四次全体会议公报], Xinhua, October 31, 2019,http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2019-10/31/c_1125178024.htm.
100 “The United States of Artificial Intelligence Startups, CBInsights, November 26, 2019,https://www.cbinsights.com/research/artificial-intelligence-startup-us-map/.
101 Ibid.
102 Joanna Glasner, “AI Companies Raise More Money Across Fewer Rounds,” Crunchbase News, September 9, 2019, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/ai-companies-raise-more- money-across-fewer-rounds/.
103 For one historical perspective, see Linda Weiss, America Inc.? Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
104 Rachel Olney, “The Rift Between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is Economic, not Moral,” War on the Rocks, January 28, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/the- rift-between-silicon-valley-and-the-pentagon-is-economic-not-moral/.
105 “The Contest for Innovation: Strengthening America’s National Security Innovation Base in an Era of Strategic Competition,” Ronald Reagan Institute, December 2019,https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/355312/the_contest_for_innovation_report.p df.
106 Ibid.
107 The levels of funding are high enough that the founder of one Chinese AI start-up characterized this as a negative. As he remarked to one of the authors, there is “too much money chasing too few good ideas.”
108 “China Is Starting To Edge Out The US In AI Investment,” CB Insights, February 12, 2019,
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/china-artificial-intelligence-investment-startups- tech/.
109 Jing Shuiyu, “AI startups see record financing in H1,” China Daily, August 3, 2017,http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/tech/2017-08/03/content_30340585.htm.
110 “The China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategic Research Academy released two heavyweight reports” [中国新一代人工智能发展战略研究院发 布两份重量级报告], Interface News [界面新闻], May 18, 2019,https://xw.qq.com/partner/wcsbzst/20190518A0EB05/20190518A0EB0500?ADTA G=undefined&pgv_ref=undefined.
111 “China VC investment hits record high in 2018: Report,” Xinhua, February 1, 2019,http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201902/01/WS5c53e434a3106c65c34e7cb2.html.
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112 See, e.g., “Used cars and AI come out on top as China's startup funding slumps,” Nikkei Asian Review, July 3, 2019, https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Used-cars-and- AI-come-out-on-top-as-China-s-startup-funding-slumps.
113 “China recruits Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent to AI ‘national team,’” South China Morning Post, November 21, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/tech/china- tech/article/2120913/china-recruits-baidu-alibaba-and-tencent-ai-national-team.
114 “Artificial Intelligence Open Platform, Have you Joined?” [人工智能开放平台，你加入 了吗-中新网”], China News, December 13, 2018,http://www.chinanews.com/it/2018/10-08/8643974.shtml; “AI “national team” Xiong’nn Debut! Will Change Your Life” [人工智能“国家队”雄安登场!将改变你的生 活], Xiong’an, November 30, 2017, http://www.xiongan.gov.cn/2017- 11/30/c_129766243.htm.
115 “Rise Of China’s Big Tech In AI: What Baidu, Alibaba, And Tencent Are Working On,” CB Insights, April 26, 2018, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/china-baidu-alibaba- tencent-artificial-intelligence-dominance/.
116 Patrick Foulis, “Across the West powerful firms are becoming even more powerful,” The Economist, November 15, 2018, https://www.economist.com/special- report/2018/11/15/across-the-west-powerful-firms-are-becoming-even-more-powerful; John Mauldin, “America Has a Monopoly Problem,” Forbes, April 11, 2019,https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2019/04/11/america-has-a-monopoly- problem/; Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
117 Mark Z. Taylor, The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
118 Martin Kenney and Urs Von Burg, “Technology, entrepreneurship and path dependence: industrial clustering in Silicon Valley and Route 128.” Industrial and corporate change 8, no. 1 (1999): 67-103; Aaron Chatterji, Edward Glaeser, and William Kerr, “Clusters of entrepreneurship and innovation,” Innovation Policy and the Economy 14, no. 1 (2014): 129-166.
119 Fareed Zakaria, “The Future of American Power,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2008-05-03/future-american- power.
120
121 MIT Committee to Evaluate the Innovation Deficit, “The Future Postponed: Why Declining Investment in Basic Research Threatens a U.S. Innovation Deficit,” April 2015,https://dc.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Future%20Postponed.pdf.
Mariana Mazzucato, “The entrepreneurial state,” Soundings 49, no. 49 (2011): 131-
142.
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122 Ding, “Deciphering China’s AI Dream.”
123 For a good analysis on the topic, see Yukon Huang and Jeremy Smith, “China’s Record on Intellectual Property Rights Is Getting Better and Better,” Foreign Policy, October 16, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/16/china-intellectual-property-theft- progress/.
124 “State Council’s Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Platforms” [国务院关于加快构建大众创业万众 创新支撑平台的指导意见], September 25, 2016,http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2015-09/26/content_10183.htm.
125 “The China New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategic Research Academy released two heavyweight reports” [中国新一代人工智能发展战略研究院发 布两份重量级报告], Interface News [界面新闻], May 18, 2019,https://xw.qq.com/partner/wcsbzst/20190518A0EB05/20190518A0EB0500?ADTA G=undefined&pgv_ref=undefined. Estimates often vary depending on what is defined as an “AI enterprise.”
126 Minghe Hu and Zen Soo, “China’s reliance on US-origin platforms for deep learning raises questions about country’s AI push,” South China Morning Post, November 22, 2019,https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/3038772/chinas-reliance-us-origin- platforms-deep-learning-raises-questions.
127 “Artificial Intelligence Open Platform, Have you Joined?” [人工智能开放平台，你加入 了吗-中新网”], China News, December 13, 2018,http://www.chinanews.com/it/2018/10-08/8643974.shtml; “Five Major National-Level Open Innovation Platforms Revealed” [五大国家级人工智能开放创新平台将集体亮相 “], January 18, 2019. See also “Ten Major National New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platforms Released in Shanghai [十大国家新一代人工智能 开放创新平台在沪发布], Science Network, August 29, 2019,http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2019/8/429964.shtm.
128 Ministry of Science and Technology Notice on the Publication of the Guidance on National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform Construction Work [科技部关于印发《国家新一代人工智能开放创新平台建设工作指引》的通知], September 17, 2019, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Ministry-and- Science-and-Technology-Notice-on-Publication-of-Guidance-1.pdf.
129 Laskai and Toner, “Can China Grow Its Own AI Tech Base.”
130 For updates on its capabilities, see, e.g. “Baidu PaddlePaddle Releases 21 New Capabilities to Accelerate Industry-Grade Model Development,” November 14, 2019,http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=126.
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131 Chris Udemans, “Alibaba Cloud opens source code for machine-learning platform Alink,” technode, November 28, 2019, https://technode.com/2019/11/28/alibaba-cloud- machine-learning-platform-open-source/.
132 “CSRankings: Computer Science Rankings,” http://csrankings.org/#/index?all.
133 Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of
False Prophecies (New York: Liveright., 2013), 172-188.
134 John Timmer, “US computer science grads outperforming those in other key nations,” ArsTechnica, March 23, 2019, https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer- science-grads-outperforming-those-in-other-key-nations/.
135
Journal of Education and Work
136 Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).
137 Michael S. Teitelbaum, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Adams B. Nager and Robert D. Atkinson, “Ten Myths of High-Skilled Immigration,” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, April 2015, http://www.ilw.com/articles/2015,0420-Atkinson.pdf.
138 Michael S. Teitelbaum, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014),https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10208.html.
139 Cary Funk and Kim Parker, “Most Americans evaluate STEM education as middling compared with other developed nations,” Pew Research Center, January 9, 2018,https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/5-most-americans-evaluate-stem- education-as-middling-compared-with-other-developed-nations/.
140 “Research Reveals Boys’ Interest in STEM Careers Declining; Girls’ Interest Unchanged,” Junior Achievement USA, https://www.juniorachievement.org/web/ja-usa/press- releases/-/asset_publisher/UmcVLQOLGie9/content/research-reveals-boys’-interest-in- stem-careers-declining-girls’-interest-unchanged; “Survey: Teen Girls’ Interest in STEM Careers Declines,” Junior Achievement, https://www.juniorachievement.org/web/ja- usa/press-releases/-/asset_publisher/UmcVLQOLGie9/content/survey-teen-girls’- interest-in-stem-careers-declines.
141 Ibid.
142 Normile, Dennis, “One in Three Chinese Children Faces an Education Apocalypse. An
Ambitious Experiment Hopes to Save Them,” Science 21 (2017).143
Adam Gamoran and Sarah K. Bruch, “Educational inequality in the United States: can we
reverse the tide?”
“Chapter 4: Shanghai and Hong Kong: Two Distinct Examples of Education Reform in
China,” in Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for
30, no. 7 (2017): 777-792.
the United States, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
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http://www.oecd.org/document/13/0,3343,en_2649_35845621_46538637_1_1_1
_1,00.html.
144 “Chinese university graduates rise exponentially, have diverse career options,” Xinhua, June 24, 2019,https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201906/24/WS5d1080bca3103dbf14329e9f.html.
145 For a good overview, see “Seizing the laurels: Tsinghua University may soon top the world league in science research,” The Economist, November 17, 201,https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-university-may-soon-top-the- world-league-in-science-research.
146 For a comparative perspective, see
147 Ricky Ye, “While US STEM education market declines, China invests heavily,” The Next Web, June 19, 2017, https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/06/19/us-stem- education-market-declines-china-invests-heavily/.
148 See initial results reported in a survey from Tsinghua University. China Institute for Science and Technology Policy at Tsinghua University, “China AI Development Report 2018,” Tsinghua University, July 2018,http://www.sppm.tsinghua.edu.cn/eWebEditor/UploadFile/China_AI_development_repo rt_2018.pdf.
149 Yi-Ling Liu, “China’s AI Dreams Aren’t for Everyone,” Foreign Policy, August 13, 2019,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/13/china-artificial-intelligence-dreams-arent-for- everyone-data-privacy-economic-inequality/.
150 iFlytek, Deeply Ploughing Education for Fifteen Years” [科大讯飞 深耕教育15年] November 21, 2019, Beijing Report [新京报], https://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2019-11- 21/doc-iihnzahi2260676.shtml.
151 Nicholas Eberstadt, “With Great Demographics Comes Great Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2019-06-11/great- demographics-comes-great-power.
152 Zwetsloot, Heston, and Arnold, “Strengthening the U.S. AI Workforce.”153 Ibid., 5.
154 “Fewer foreign students coming to the United States for the second year in row, survey finds,” Reuters, November 13, 2018,https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/fewer-foreign-students-coming-united- states-second-year-row-survey-n935701; Zachary Arnold, Roxanne Heston, Remco Zwetsloot, and Tina Huang, “Immigration Policy and the U.S. AI Sector: A Preliminary
Wang, Yan, Jari Lavonen, and Kirsi Tirri, “Aims for
learning 21st century competencies in national primary science curricula in China and
Finland,” Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education (2018).
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Assessment,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, September 2019, 2-4,https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET_Immigration_Policy_and_AI.pdf.
155 Ibid., Section 3.
156 Alana Semeuls, “Tech Companies Say It’s Too Hard to Hire High-Skilled Immigrants in the U.S. — So They're Growing in Canada Instead,” Time, July 25, 2019,https://time.com/5634351/canada-high-skilled-labor-immigrants/.
157 Zwetsloot, Heston, and Arnold, “Strengthening the U.S. AI Workforce.”
158 At present, China’s fertility rates are below replacement levels, and even the recent changes to the one-child policy won’t compensate for these adverse trends. See also Nicholas Eberstadt, “With Great Demographics Comes Great Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2019-06-11/great- demographics-comes-great-power.
159 Ding, “Deciphering China’s AI Dream.”
160 William Hannas and Huey-meei Chang, “China’s Access to Foreign AI Technology: An Assessment,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, September 2019,https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp- content/uploads/CSET_China_Access_To_Foreign_Technology.pdf.
161 Meng Jing, “Chinese firms fight to lure top artificial intelligence talent from Silicon Valley,” South China Morning Post, April 2, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/tech/china- tech/article/2084171/chinese-firms-fight-lure-top-artificial-intelligence-talent-silicon.
162 Remco Zwetsloot and Dahlia Peterson, “The US-China Tech Wars: China’s Immigration Disadvantage,” The Diplomat, December 31, 2019,https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/the-us-china-tech-wars-chinas-immigration- disadvantage/.
163 See MIT’s description of these engagements: Adam Conner-Simons, “CSAIL launches new five-year collaboration with iFlyTek,” MIT News, https://news.mit.edu/2018/csail- launches-five-year-collaboration-with-iflytek-0615.
164 Hal Brands and Peter D. Feaver, “What Are America’s Alliances Good For?” Parameters 47, Issue 2 (Summer 2017): 15-30.
165 Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). See also Niall Ferguson, “The False Prophecy of Hyperconnection,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2017,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-08-15/false-prophecy-hyperconnection; Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations,” International Organization 63, Issue 3 (July 2009): 559-592,https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/network- analysis-for-international-relations/DE2910979C1B5C44C4CC13F336C5DE97.
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166 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “America’s Edge,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2009-01-01/americas-edge.
167 Ibid.
168 James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Free Press, 1986); Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).
169 “China AI Development Report 2018,” China Institute for Science and Technology Policy at Tsinghua University.
170 See, e.g., Felicia Schwartz and Dov Lieber, “Chinese Investment in Israel Raises Security Fears,” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese- investment-in-israel-raises-security-fears-11549881000.
171 “Artificial Intelligence and National Security,” Congressional Research Service, January 30, 2019, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45178.pdf.
172 For context, see “CFIUS Reform: Foreign Investment National Security Reviews,” Congressional Research Service, October 3, 2019,https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IF10952.pdf.
173 Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh, “China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable A Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of U.S. Innovation,” January 2018,https://admin.govexec.com/media/diux_chinatechnologytransferstudy_jan_2018_(1).pdf.
174 China and the Philippines established a “Data port” in September 2018. China also initiated the Digital Silk Road International Industry Alliance. For more information, see “China's big data companies embark on the “Belt and Road”” [中国大数据企业走上“一 带一路”], Xinhua, December 14, 2018, http://news.xinhuanet.com/globe/2018- 12/14/c_137663769.html; “Digital Economy and Digital Silk Road International Conference proposes to jointly build digital silk road,” Zhejiang Daily, September 19, 2018.
175 See, e.g., “BRI helps participating countries with technological innovation,” People’s Daily, April 26, 2019, http://en.people.cn/n3/2019/0426/c90000-9572518.html.
176 Elizabeth C. Economy, “China’s New Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-04-17/chinas-new-revolution.
177 “China and France’s top universities build ‘AI Alliance’ to promote artificial intelligence international cooperation,” Xinhua, January 18, 2018.
178 “AI, Another Breakthrough in Sino-UK Innovation Cooperation” [ 人工智能 中英创新 合作又一风口], People’s Daily, November 3, 2018,http://world.people.com.cn/GB/n1/2018/1103/c1002-30380012.html.
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179 “China and Russia big data base will be built in Harbin at the end of the year” [中俄大数 据基地年底将在哈尔滨建成], Harbin Daily, March 11, 2018,https://web.archive.org/save/https://zj.zjol.com.cn/news.html?id=890364.
The project has been successfully supported by the 2017 National Development and Reform Commission Digital Economy Pilot Major Project. a major project of Heilongjiang Province
180 “Lecture Series on “China-Russia Economic and Trade Cooperation Database and Russian-Chinese Intelligent Integrated Service Platform”” [“中俄经贸合作数据库及俄汉 语智能化综合服务平台”项目系列讲座中俄经贸合作数据库及俄汉语智能化综合服 务平台], November 1, 2018,https://web.archive.org/save/http://yuyanziyuan.blcu.edu.cn/info/1066/1259.htm.
181 Miles Brundage et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Preventing, and Mitigation,” February 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07228.pdf.
182 Andrew Imbrie and Elsa B. Kania, “AI Safety, Security, and Stability Among Great Powers: Options, Challenges, and Lessons Learned for Pragmatic Engagement,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, December 2019, https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp- content/uploads/AI-Safety-Security-and-Stability-Among-the-Great-Powers.pdf.
183 William J. Burns, “The Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, October 14, 2019; Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018).
184 Elsa B. Kania,” The Right to Speak: Discourse and Chinese Power,” Center for Advanced China Research, 27, 2018. See also Joel Wuthnow, “The concept of soft power in China’s strategic discourse,” Issues & Studies 44, no. 2 (2008): 1-28.
185 Kristine Lee and Alexander Sullivan, “People’s Republic of the United Nations: China’s Emerging Revisionism in International Organizations,” Center for a New American Security, May 14, 2019, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/peoples-republic-of-the- united-nations.
186 See, e.g., Elsa B. Kania, “China’s play for global 5G dominance—standards and the ‘Digital Silk Road’,” The Strategist, ASPI, June 27, 2018,https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinas-play-for-global-5g-dominance-standards-and- the-digital-silk-road/.
187 Graham Webster, Rogier Creemers, Paul Triolo, and Elsa Kania, “China’s Plan to Lead in AI: Purpose, Prospects, and Problems,” New America, August 1, 2017,https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/blog/chinas-plan-lead-ai-purpose- prospects-and-problems/.
188 For authoritative reporting on these issues, see Paul Mozur, “One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority,” New York Times, April 14, 2019,https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial- intelligence-racial-profiling.html.
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189 “Beijing AI Principles,” May 29, https://www.baai.ac.cn/blog/beijing-ai-principles. See also “China Hosts Conference to Promote Ethical AI Standards,” China Daily, June 19, 2019,http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201906/19/WS5d098cdfa3103dbf14329084.html; Will Knight, “Why Does Beijing Suddenly Care About AI Ethics?” MIT Technology Review,https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613610/why-does-china-suddenly-care-about-ai- ethics-and-privacy/.
190 See, e.g., “World Artificial Intelligence Conference,”http://www.worldaic.com.cn/portal/en/index.html; “Global Artificial Intelligence Conference,” https://gaitc.caai.cn/en.
191 See, e.g., “Countering High-Tech Illiberalism,” https://www.cnas.org/press/press- release/countering-high-tech-illiberalism. See also Freedom House, “Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom- net/freedom-net-2018/rise-digital-authoritarianism. For a policy brief on the topic, see Alina Polyakova and Chris Meserole, “Exporting digital authoritarianism,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/08/FP_20190826_digital_authoritarianism_polyakova_meserole .pdf.
192 Samantha Hoffman, “Managing the State: Social Credit, Surveillance and the CCP’s Plan for China,” in Nicholas D. Wright, ed., AI, China, Russia, and the Global Order: Technological, Political, Global, and Creative Perspectives, A Strategic Multiyear Assessment Periodic Publication, 2018, 42, https://nsiteam.com/social/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/AI-China-Russia-Global-WP_FINAL.pdf.
193 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016.
194 However, the realization of this potential advantage requires the effective use of this data.195 Brooks and Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower.”
196 Ibid.
197 Brooks and Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower”; Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli, “Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage,” International Security, 43, Issue 3 (Winter 2018/19): 141-189.
198 “Costs of War,” Watson Institute, Brown University,https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.
199 See the Defense Innovation Board’s project and report on the topic: “Software is Never Done: Refactoring the Acquisition Code for Competitive Advantage,” May 13, 2019. “Software Acquisition and Practices (SWAP) Study,”https://innovation.defense.gov/software/.
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200 “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States,” Report to President Donald J. Trump by the Interagency Task Force in Fulfillment of Executive Order 13806, September 2018,https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASSESSING-AND- STRENGTHENING-THE-MANUFACTURING-AND%20DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE- AND-SUPPLY-CHAIN-RESILIENCY.PDF.
201 Xi Jinping Discusses Military-Civil Fusion” [习近平谈军民融合], Seeking Truth [求是], October 16, 2018, http://www.qstheory.cn/zhuanqu/rdjj/2018- 10/16/c_1123565364.htm. See also Elsa B. Kania, “In Military-Civil Fusion, China is Learning Lessons from the United States and Starting to Innovate,” The Strategy Bridge, August 27, 2019, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/8/27/in-military-civil- fusion-china-is-learning-lessons-from-the-united-states-and-starting-to-innovate.
202 Ibid.
203 Elsa B. Kania, “Chinese Military Innovation in Artificial Intelligence,” Testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 2019,https://www.cnas.org/publications/congressional-testimony/chinese-military-innovation- in-artificial-intelligence.
204 CETC Military-Civil Fusion Network Information Systems Appear at Zhuhai Airshow [中国 电科军民融合的网络信息体系亮相珠海航展], February 25, 2019,http://www.cetcd.cn/html/2019-02/7435.html.
205 Ibid.206 Ibid.
207 State Council Notice on the Issuance of the New Generation AI Development Plan” [国务 院关于印发新一代人工智能发展规划的通知], July 20, 2017,http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2017-07/20/content_5211996.htm; Graham Webster, Rogier Creemers, Paul Triolo, and Elsa Kania, “Full Translation: China's ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ (2017),” New America,https://www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/full-translation- chinas-new-generation-artificial-intelligence-development-plan-2017/; “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” White House, February 11, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-maintaining- american-leadership-artificial-intelligence/.
208 For an excellent resource on the topic, see the 2019 AI Index Report. This Index provides tools and datasets to evaluate progress in AI, which is available through Stanford’s initiative on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. For more information, see “Artificial Intelligence Index: 2019 Annual Report,” https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2019.
209 Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (Ayer Company Publishers, 1995).
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210 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Vol. 1 (Anthem Press, 2015).
211 For context, see “DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative,”https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/electronics-resurgence-initiative.
212 Such an initiative could build upon antecedents. See “Public-Private Partnerships for Semiconductor Research,” https://www.nist.gov/industry-impacts/public-private- partnerships-semiconductor-research.
213 See future research forthcoming from CSET by Remco Zwetsloot et al. that will provide a more detailed analysis of this policy issue.
214 Eliezer Geisler and Wagdy Abdallah, The Metrics of Science and Technology (Quorum Books, 2000); OECD Science, Technology, and Industry Outlook, 2014 (OECD Publishing, 2014).
215 For an excellent overview of this issue, see “Campaign for an AI Ready Force,”
https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/31/2002204191/-1/- 1/0/CAMPAIGN_FOR_AN_AI_READY_FORCE.PDF.
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A Look Back: A Fans Recollection Of Past Seasons
With the sports world at a halt for the foreseeable future, I wanted to go back and take a look at memorable moments in Twins history. I started going to at-least 25 games or more in 2013 and have tons of memories at the ballpark in those eight years that followed.
2013 Minnesota Twins season:
2013 was very memorable for myself because I went on my first spring training trip in March. I remember my first spring training game on March 13, where the Twins took on the Orioles. Brian Dozier made a great play at second base, which be a foreshadowing moment because we would later become a Gold Glover. The Twins lost the first three games I attended then beat the Pirates on the last day of my trip. April 1st was Opening Day at Target Field. It was a chilly day, but I remained in my seat for the whole game. Vance Worley got the start and pitched fairly well. The Twins couldn’t seem to hit Justin Verlander and the Tigers won 4-2. I returned to the ballpark two days later and Kevin Correia tossed a gem of a game. The Tigers handed a 2-1 lead over to Phil Coke and the Twins rallied in the ninth. Trevor Plouffe led-off with a walk and Brian Dozier singled to right wit one-out. Eduardo Escobar hit a ball to the gap in left-center field that scored pinch-runner Jamey Carroll. Brian Dozier raced all the way around from first base and beat the relay throw to score the game-winning run. It’s still one of my favorite moments that I have been apart of in the stands. My next game was on April 15th on Jackie Robinson Day. Oswaldo Arcia made his Major League debut that night and the Twins beat up on Joe Blanton behind Joe Mauer’s four hits. That spring was a cold one as a Marlins-Twins game was postponed due to snow. They played a doubleheader in 42 degree weather the next day, but I missed both games. The weather warmed up when I went to the April 26th game against the Rangers. Justin Grimm threw seven shutout innings, but the Twins rallied in the ninth with an Oswaldo Arcia three-run home run. Joe Nathan was able to shut the door for the save as the Rangers won. I only went to one game in May of 2013. The Twins hit four home runs to beat the Brewers on May 30th. My next game was on June 14th when the Tigers were back in town. Rick Porcello shut out the Twins in a Tigers 4-0 win. I returned to the ballpark on Father’s Day, but Doug Fister tossed another brilliant game in a Tigers victory. The White Sox were in town to close out the homestand. I went to the game on June 19th and the Twins beat Chris Sale 7-4 that night. The Twins returned home a week later and my sister and I went to the game on June 27th. A quick game ensued as Jeremy Guthrie and Samuel Deduno dueled. The Twins held on for a 3-1 victory at Target Field. The Yankees came to town in early-July. I attended the July 1st game with my cousin and saw the Yankees put up seven runs in the last two innings. That Yankees team had a lot of weird names, but they got the win that night. I returned to the ballpark on the 4th of July. The Yankees put up nine runs that afternoon as the Twins were handed another loss. The All-Star Break came and went and I went to the first game of the second half. It was Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau’s double bobblehead night. A late Joe Mauer RBI single put the Twins ahead 3-2 and Glen Perkins closed the door on the win. Unfortunately, the Twins were off on my birthday and I went to the July 30th game. The Royals got the best of Mike Pelfrey and Ervin Santana got the win. I followed that with a Sunday afternoon game against the Astros. A Oswaldo Arcia homer in the seventh helped the Twins win 3-2. The next time I went to the ballpark is one of my most memorable games. Andrew Albers threw a two-hit shutout against the Indians in his second start as a Twin. Two days later, I went to the Wednesday afternoon match-up. It was a long day as the Indians beat the Twins 9-8 in a twelve-inning affair. Joe Mauer had five hits that day in a losing effort. The Twins had a makeup game the next Monday against the Mets. Dillon Gee threw a game game as the Mets won 6-1. The Royals came back to Target Field in late-August. Andrew Albers threw a great game, but the bullpen gave up five runs later in a 8-1 loss. That September I went to quite a few games. The Blue Jays came to town and R.A. Dickey beat Mike Pelfrey that night. I went to a pair of A’s-Twins games later that week. Josh Willingham hit a late home run in a win on Tuesday night then the A’s put up 18 runs in a win the next night. I remember a Jed Lowrie ball that should have been called foul, but it ended up being a two-run double. The Rays were in town that Friday and Chris Archer shut the Twins out. The last homestand came around and the Twins beat the Tigers on a Josmil Pinto walk-off single. The Indians beat the Twins on Friday night 12-6 in what was my first Zubaz game. I went to the last game of the season that Sunday and Ubaldo Jimenez pitched a gem. The Indians clinched a Wild-Card spot and celebrated at Target Field. I’ll remember 2013 fondly because it was the first year that I went to a lot of games. It was fun remembering my first year in spring training and under the sun at Target Field.
-Chris Kreibich-
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Why this year is different (although 5 game series are often skewed by sample size and who knows if it will even matter)
I’ve heard a lot of commentary about the Twins season. None of it is too optimistic about their prospects in the playoffs, and that’s understandable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLIt6xGSqek
That link is the game following the last playoff win in franchise history. It boils down to one mistake, leaving Joe Nathan to try for a third inning. Since then and including that game, the Twins are 0-13, with 10 of those losses coming against the Yankees, who the Twins will play this year for the Division series. But the Nathan mistake isn’t why we lost that series, nor is the Torii Hunter missed catch in ‘06 the reason we lost that series.
A lot of folks think we’re cursed, and that certainly would work as a narrative. A-Rod’s RBI double in 2004, or his home run in ’09 preceding Texiera’s walk-off. Curtis Granderson’s triple in ’10 comes to mind. But everything must come to an end- the curse of the Bambino did, as did the Cubs’, and the Twins aren’t going to lose every playoff game for the rest of their existence. It starts with one game, and I think the 2019 squad is built to do that. Here’s why:
2002 Twins 86-75
2003 Twins 85-77
2004 Twins 87-75
2006 Twins 93-69
2009 Twins 86-77
2010 Twins 92-70
2017 Twins 83-79
2019 Twins 98-64
These are the Pythagorean records for all Twins playoff teams since I have been conscious, and it really validates what I stress when I talk about the 2019 Twins, which is that this is the first team I’ve ever seen that is actually GOOD. Like good good. ALCS good. Which is why we can beat the Yankees this year, legitimately, or at least take it to game 5. Let me explain:
2002-2018: From Rick Reed to Addison Reed
The 2002 team had no fear. The playoffs were brand new and they won a weak AL Central with solid contributions from tons of guys- no mid 2010’s Detroit Tigers stars and scrubs BS here. 12 guys had more than 2 bWAR (a measure of overall value from baseballreference.com- 0 means totally replaceable, anything above 5 means a star player), including a career year for J.C Romero, who as a lefty pitched in 81 innings, allowing a total of 17 runs, with 3 home runs, 62 hits. bWAR for his season was 3.6. We also got nice above average seasons from Corey Koskie (How good could he have been not under the Twins slap hitting tutelage and minus his later concussion issues?), Bobby Kielty, Tony Fiore (91 good innings out of the pen), Kyle Lohse, Dustan Mohr; even Rick Reed was pretty good that year. The Giants and the Angels were better constructed teams, and it would have been a miracle for the Twins to go all the way that year. I couldn’t believe when they beat they A’s, and I couldn’t believe when Joe Mays shut the Angels down in Game 1. 8 innings, no runs and the Angels could not get a barrel to the ball to save their lives. We lost to the Angels because they were a better team (They won 99 games that year) but like the Astros in 2015, it was a good stepping stone for a solid core of guys.
The 2003 team was worse. There was no David Ortiz and only Brad Radke had an ERA+ (a measure of pitching that corrects for context, average score is 100) that was above average in our regular rotation. It was 101. Shannon Stewart and Johan Santana had to save the season and lift us over the White Sox* and Royals, who had a magical season 11 years before they meant to- they had prime Mike Sweeney and Carlos Beltran, but their #1 pitcher (as I recalled but had to confirm) was Darrell May, who had a legitimately good season but would never do THAT again.
*I’m pretty sure the White Sox were the better team that year. They had prime Bartolo, Mark Buehrle, early ok Jon Garland and that one of year of Esteban Loaiza where he almost won the CY Young (226.1 innings of 2.90 ERA ball with a k rate of 8.2, his career k rate was 5.9). They also had prime Magglio Ordonez and Carlos Lee, and this was one of the years in the oughts where Frank Thomas stayed together and hit 42 bombs.
But the Twins prevailed with Shannon Stewart magic plus solid years from Mientkiewicz, Koskie and Pierzynski, won Game 1 against the Yankees because we let Johan Santana free (for 4 innings, as that was the game where he didn’t eat enough potassium and cramped out of the game), and then got swept the rest of the way, getting shut down by Andy Pettite Roger Clemens and David Wells. It was kind of an accidental bullpen game in game 1, but more on that later.
The ‘04 Twins went back to being pitching dominant, with the first year of full season Johan (and his best year) and Joe Nathan joining the fold along with lights out Juan Rincon (watch him strike out Jorge Posada in the 8th in game 2). Radke was great, and Carlos Silva soaked up the rest. If Joe Mauer hadn’t gotten hurt that team could have been something, because the lineup was rough and relied a lot on career year Lew Ford (more on that later). Doug Mientkiewicz, Jacque Jones, Christian Guzman and Henry Blanco all struggled to various degrees. Morneau provided a spark in the second half, taking over for Mientkiewicz at the trade deadline and hitting 19 bombs.
As I inferred, I put myself through watching game 2 of the ALDS against the Yankees (up 1-0) recently and everything that I remembered from it came rushing back: Koskie’s double against Rivera that would have scored 2 but bounced into the stands, instead tying the game at 5. Then Hunter’s big home run in the 12th, and Nathan to all the world looking like he was out of gas in his third inning of work in the 12th - with 1 out he walked Miguel Cairo as well as Jeter to bring up A-Rod. What I didn’t remember was that Nathan threw a decent slider off the plate down and away, and A-Rod showed why he was one of the top 5 hitters of his generation and almost hit it out, poking a ground rule double (were it a regular double it would have been a walk off) to tie the game. After intentionally walking Sheffield, J.C Romero got Hideki Matsui on a soft fly out to Jones in right, and a good throw would have gotten Jeter. That didn’t happen, and one Carlos Silva start and a Rincon implosion later the Twins were done. The Twins hit well in the series after not doing that all season, but two decisions cost them: leaving Nathan in obviously, and giving Carlos Silva (and Kyle Lohse) a start. The lineup had gotten hot, but archaic ideas about how to use pitching in the playoffs cost them big- although those ideas wouldn’t truly be challenged until Craig Counsell took the Dodgers to 7 games in 2018.
I was jazzed about ’06. They had a good power and speed mix (On base percentages of Bartlett, Castillo and Punto: .367, .358, .352) with Morneau and Mauer both breaking out to post over 10 bWAR between them, Santana winning another Cy Young, and Francisco Liriano having his Greek tragedy. The bullpen was great, with Nathan having arguably his best year, Dennys Reyes giving up 5 runs the whole year and Rincon, Pat Neshek and Crain pitching in solidly.
But Barry Zito outdueled Santana in game 1, Mark Kotsay hit his inside the park home run on the ball Torii dove for but couldn’t keep in front in game 2 (right after we had tied the game with back to back jacks from Cuddyer and Morneau). And that was all the starting pitching we had- with Liriano done, and Boof Bonser pitching out of his mind in game 2, we had can’t-brush-his-teeth torn rotator cuff Brad Radke trying to gut his way through and running out of guts. And cartilage.
Maybe Craig Counsell or Kevin Cash could have made it work, but in 2006 there just wasn’t enough pitching.
In ’09 we had MVP Joe Mauer, Jason Kubel’s best year and Denard Span’s emergence. But the pitching relied a lot on Nick Blackburn and the mad rush to beat the Tigers in game 163 left us with Brian Duensing in game 1 against the Yankees. Brian Duensing was a nice pitcher that year, but he couldn’t handle that assignment. Game 2 was the Phil Cuzzi calling a fair ball foul game, the most errant umpiring call I know of next to the Armando Gallaraga perfect game disaster. Mauer singled anyway to start the 11th. So did Kubel and Cuddyer. Bases loaded, no outs, Delmon Young at the plate- he scaldes a line drive to Texiera at first for a loud out. Carlos Gomez grounds into a fielders choice at home, and Brendan Harris pops out. Kinda deserved that walkoff.
Who are you pitching with this team in a 7 game series anyway? And depth was an issue as well, otherwise Harris wouldn’t have come in for MATT TOLBERT, Gomez wouldn’t have hit with his .623 season OPS, and nor would Delmon with his .733. Blackburn and Pavano combined to go 12 innings, allowing 3 total runs between them in games 2 and 3, so even with those bonuses the fact that the team couldn’t even get to 4 games says a lot.
2010 could have been something, with a good offense led by Mauer and Thome, the one year Delmon Young was good, the year we had J.J Hardy and Orlando Hudson and Liriano had 200 k’s. But Morneau got his concussion, Nathan had Tommy John surgery, Kubel Cuddyer and Span all had bad years and it came down to Curtis Granderson hitting a clutch triple off of a cruising Liriano (The Twins led 3-0 going into the bottom of the 6th). Then the Twins realized that as nice as their seasons were, Carl Pavano and Duensing weren’t pitchers you rely on in the postseason- they pitched to contact and if their command wasn’t perfect they would get exposed. Guess what happened.
In 2017 the team wasn’t good. And they wouldn’t have made the playoffs if the Orioles, Angels and Royals didn’t all collapse while the Twins played .500 ball in September. Their starting pitching was average, with a great Ervin Santana season and a good Berrios one. But unlike the other teams on this list, the bullpen was suspect, with a not-quite-figured-out Ryan Pressly, sinker throwing Tyler Duffey and a Matt Belisle on the right side with a non-slider throwing Taylor Rogers on the left. Alan Busenitz and Trevor Hildenberger had career years but weren’t helpful in the Wild Card game, or really ever again.
The offense was the best of all the teams so far in a bit of foreshadowing, scoring 815 runs and featuring the last good Brian Dozier season, the start of Jorge Polanco busting out, and Joe Mauer having one last .300 season. Miguel Sano looked like a star for 3 months, then busted his shin and got a titanium rod inserted into it because he doesn’t care about baseball or something. Byron Buxton even had his first sustained period of excellence in the second half (and played 140 games!)
Relying on the back end of the rotation
Those are the 7 playoff teams of the millennium. And here are the Game 3 starters for each ALDS team starting with ’02:
Rick Reed
Kyle Lohse
Carlos Silva
Zombie Brad Radke
Carl Pavano
Brian Duensing
That group had a combined record of 0-6. This year the hope is that the new regime is smart enough to know that, even though they have 2 starters in Kyle Gibson and Martin Perez who are comparable to that group, and who tried hard and won double digit games, their best bet is to bullpen that game.
One aspect of the playoffs that teams are getting wise to but which have killed Clayton Kershaw in the past, is the inclination to “trust your guys” and “dance with the girl who you brought” or some other idiom about sticking with a certain pitcher out of loyalty or sense of obligation. Carlos Silva had a good ’04 season; of course Gardy would want to give him a playoff start. His results were quite a bit better than Kyle Gibson’s 2019.
But hitters hit .310/.342/.462 against Silva that year. You’re trusting your season to him continuing to get lucky. He gave up 10 hits and the series swung 2-1 to the Yankees.
Results aren’t predictive
What we have in 2019 is the possibility that the Twins brass has learned from the mistakes of the past. You saw it in 2017 when they traded our closer, Brandon Kintzler, at the trade deadline. They knew that despite what the results showed, the team wasn’t good. Even though they got hot and made the WC game, they knew it wasn’t sustainable yet, and didn’t go crazy on free agents or win-now trades.
What the Levine Falvey regime did was take an objective view of their assets (is Mike Morin’s success sutainable? No? Ok then I won’t pitch him in the 7th inning of a playoff game. In fact, I’ll let him be the Phillies problem). They also threw all the “Twins way” shit out the window. No more getting benched for not going the other way, or for trying to hit a home run. And I know that point of view is very much a feeling and not really tangible- something inferred from David Ortiz’s comments years ago, a general sense watching games announced by Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven, that power is nice but luxurious, as though wanting it too badly should be a sin. And then you have Joe Mauer, who embodied every aspect of that feeling- a guy who looked for his whole career like he could hit home runs, but didn’t because he wasn’t flashy, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself and must have believed that slapping singles and doubles to left field would be a more productive route in the end.
Here’s the big secret about Joe Mauer: As talented as he was- as a catcher, in his general coordination, in his eye at the plate, and his ability to slap an RBI single in some key spots for 14 years, he was kind of a moron. Seemed like he was a nice guy. But he has never in his life said anything remotely close to insightful and I truly believe that he earnestly and wrongly thought he could best serve his team by staying behind the ball and slapping it to left field. He was probably told that from a young age.
He mistook an illusion for a reality, and so did the Twins for 51 years. Every color guy on every team’s broadcast will talk about the importance of the fundamentals, getting the guy over, laying down a good bunt and going the other way. They will talk up players who do that for eternity, and constantly lament how the game isn’t played that way anymore. To every team trying to win, this is taken with a big fucking grain of Morton brand industrial sidewalk salt. They want 2-3 guys like that. To the Twins it was religion. They wanted 12-15 guys like that. They wanted Matt Tolbert, Nick Punto, Denny Hocking and Juan Castro. The did NOT want J.J Hardy or David Ortiz.
This has changed, hopefully, and with Mauer gone, it may have rinsed away completely. We set the freaking home run record. Mitch Garver openly admits he is trying to hit home runs. Max Kepler found out his power is to the pull side. Jorge Polanco found out he could take a rip early in the count. It’s all new; it’s all different. And I’m not saying the Twins will beat the Yankees in the first round because of this philosophy shift. What I am saying is that the 2019 Twins are NOT:
A Cinderella team getting their feet wet around 12 slightly above average guys (2002)
A decent offense with no pitching plus Shannon Stewart (2003)
A great pitching staff 1-2 with an average offense that gave starts to Carlos Silva and Kyle Lohse in the playoffs (2004)
A team with Boof Bonser as its #2 (2006)
A team that relied heavily on Blackburn, Pavano and Duensing in playoff games (2009 and 2010)
A lucky team with no bullpen and 1.5 starters (2017)
So maybe they will.
What’s different now
The best team out of the prior playoff teams is probably the ’04 team, whose struggling offense didn’t struggle in the playoffs. And with Santana being the best and Radke being HIS best, a modern manager could have used their decent bullpen to build something.
Now imagine the ’04 team, except their offense is much better. MUCH better. And despite having only two effective starters, can bullpen their way to wins with a pen that goes 6-7 deep. And unlike a Tony Fiore or a Ron Mahay, or a Matt Capps or Alex Burnett, this bullpen does stuff you can’t fake- stuff you can’t luck your way into.
Opponents are hitting .157/.223/.245 against Tyler Duffey in the second half.
They’re hitting .159/.220/.354 against Trevor May
(Both those guys were good in the first half, too)
Taylor Rogers gave up a .225/.273/.353 line for the year
To my count there are 9 relievers that can be counted on in different spots- Rogers, Duffey, May, Romo, Littell, Stashak, Dobnak, Graterol and Smeltzer (by different spots I mean that Rocco won’t throw Smeltzer into the 8th inning of a tie game to face Aaron Judge).
That depth can be leveraged to overcome the loss of Michael Pineda, and the fact that Berrios and Odorizzi are no locks to be effective. Stashak and Smeltzer can both give you 3 innings of effective mop-up duty that keep games close, and allows the offense to come back by exploiting New York’s middling starting pitching, and mercurial late inning relief (Namely Britton, Green and Ottavino).
How to cope when Lew Ford leads your team in total bases
Almost as importantly, the offense isn’t going to need guys who had career years to continue thriving in the post when they were clearly playing above their true talent level. Lew Ford carried the ’04 team at times, but he was still Lew Ford, and he showed it against the Yankees and for the rest of his career. Same with Nick Punto in ‘06. Nelson Cruz is a force who scares the Royals as much as the Yankees.
Mitch Garver didn’t hot streak his way into a 1000 OPS; he’s kept it above .919 since April 9th. Check his game log.
These guys are actually good. So is Max Kepler, who I hope is ok. You don’t hit 36 bombs with reverse platoon splits by accident.
Marwin Gonzalez isn’t a great hitter but I trust he’ll take a good at bat when we need him too. You’ll appreciate that when you watch rookie Jason Kubel swing at two straight pitches at his eyes against Rivera in ’04.
Eddie Rosario is the wild card, and teams NEED* a wild card:
*Delmon Young on the Tigers, Yasiel Puig on the Dodgers, Alfonso Soriano on the Yankees, Eric Byrnes on the Diamondbacks. Rafael Devers for the Red Sox last year. That’s Rosario. Everyone needs an underachiever from the regular season to come up in the post.
Rosario, Polanco, Garver, Cruz, Sano and Kepler could all be game changing offensive players in a short series, which is not a quantity we’ve seen since Morneau went down with his concussion in ’10.
There’s no curse, the Yankees just exploited an obvious weakness of the Twins 4.5 separate times. That weaknesses boiled down to smoke and mirrors results that translated to good regular season stats, which led to Terry Ryan and Gardy trusting those results to be predictive. The 2019 team wasn’t built that way, otherwise Brandon Kintzler might still be part of it. The bullpen will have to perform for a lot of innings, the lineup will have to score, and one of Berrios and Odorizzi will have to perform to or above his talent level. As likely as it has ever been, this team could, say it with me here- take it to a game 5.
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Dave Chappelle: The Fourth World War
So, it's official - Dave Chappelle's been cancelled. How funny it is that these days to be cancelled often means that somebody has returned to our screens after a long hiatus.
Doubtless you've already seen any number of articles wailing and gnashing their teeth over Chappelle's new Netflix special, Sticks & Stones. Vice (who, if you'll credit it, actually published interesting stuff once upon a time) literally exhorted people not to watch it. And, predictably as a sunset, all this fury from the bluechecked reviewer elite encouraged people to watch it in their droves.
This quickly turned into yet another example of the apparent disconnect between the fourth estate and real people. A screengrab from Rotten Tomatoes puts the story in simple terms - professional reviewers in aggregate put it at a sickly 30-something-percent. Meanwhile, the great viewing public's score briefly touched an unblemished 100 percent, and, at the time of writing, is still on fully 99.
But simplified stories can be deceptive, and this one is. The Tomatoes’ aggregated total is drawn from a mere sixteen reviews - comparatively slender in an age where anyone can spew their guts up onto the internet. I'm Rotten Tomatoes-approved, for instance, and I can promise you this doesn't immediately translate into Vice handing you large cheques to bitch about your drug problems or your torrid love life. Further, to rate something 'rotten' can be anywhere up to a rating of 49%, and even within the paid-up critics this was by no means the universal consensus, simply the majority.
So what gives? How did the opinions of sixteen people, barely enough to fill a bus, become another story about how you can't say anything these days? There was something similar at work with the latest retread of the Shaft franchise, where the unreconstructed masculinity of Shaft, as played by Samuel L. 'And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee' Jackson, is contrasted with the millennial softboy image of his estranged son. That work, too, has an alarming discrepancy between the critics' scores and the audience scores (again, 30-something to 90-something).
Much like Sticks & Stones, reviewers from a good number of established outfits (including, to my disgust, Rolling Stone, where Dr. Hunter S. Thompson spent his salad years) launched a broadside against Shaft's blatant lack of political correctness. Obviously I have some terrible news for them about the history of the Shaft franchise, and the blaxploitation genre as a whole. The point is, though, as with Sticks & Stones, this predictable response just encouraged more people to watch it. Why, it's almost as if they were doing it deliberately!
And they were. It's obvious they were. By the time I actually saw Sticks & Stones, I'd seen a good portion of those angry headlines - but I'd also seen how Netflix had tagged the special, and before even calling it 'comedy', they'd called it 'politically incorrect'. In other words, that's the exact brand it's chasing, and the journalistic class fell for it. Not all of them, but more than enough to whip up a narrative that those awful, censorious PC thugs are having a go at good old Chappelle.
This has been tried the other way round with less success. Most notably, there was the all-female Ghostbusters remake in 2016, whose audiences felt they were literally sticking it to the man - that is to say, the various sexists and traditionalists whose knees jerked at the very idea. Columbia Pictures wound up losing $125 million on that project, getting their fingers burnt so badly they declared it damnatio memoriae and now plan to reboot the series right back to its original continuity.
Ironically, the gender-flipped Ghostbusters’ approach was at bottom a reactionary thing - trying to make the best of the anti-PC opposition it received. Chappelle's new show, meanwhile, was clearly playing on this angle from the start. Even the name's a giveaway: 'sticks and stones', as in 'will break my bones but words will never hurt me'. That's the thesis that's thoroughly rejected by your archetypal ‘social justice warrior’, those of the mythical callout-culture mob, who, despite their alleged ubiquity, have done precisely nothing to hurt Chappelle's bottom line, and in fact probably helped the viewing figures.
The usual name for an entity like this that can only feign a threat is a paper tiger, so it was curiously on-the-nose to see Bill Burr come out with a Netflix special of his own literally called 'Paper Tiger' not two weeks later. Burr, too, attacks the right-on faction - if anything, more loudly and aggressively than Chappelle ever did. So the same audiences that lapped up 'Sticks & Stones' eagerly sucked this down too, awarding it fully 97%. But the critics loved it too, and as I write this their Rotten Tomatoes rating for 'Paper Tiger' sits prettily on 86%.
Were I being flippant, I'd put the difference there down to flat racism. But the two specials and their two frontmen are, despite everything, far too similar for that. Both are well-established figures on the comedy circuit, who've had TV shows of their own, and who are now good family men, who presumably forbid their own children to watch their material.
So why'd the critics prefer Burr's output? Dare I say it, he failed to rile the PC vanguard simply because Chappelle had beaten him to it. It's unlikely those journos figured out Chappelle had tricked them. Far more probable that they considered villainising another comedy special quite so soon would be getting dangerously samey. It’s called ‘news’, after all. And, indeed, the contrarian audiences who so delight in defying the nanny-press probably weren't in the mood either - they probably still watched Burr's one, just not out of spite.
Alternatively, it's because the critics didn't expect anything different from Burr. He's been on record and on stage many times before about his dislike of PC culture. It's not that Chappelle has previously been particularly PC himself, but - and here the flat racism raises its ugly head again - there is perhaps a feeling of wounded betrayal in seeing such sentiments coming from a gentleman of colour. Identity politics have always cut both ways, and there is a natural assumption that anyone in that sprawling, seething mass of people labelled 'minorities' must defer to a certain way of thinking.
The real irony of it all, though, is this: while 'Sticks and Stones' and 'Paper Tiger' weren't made by and for the PC party line, they aren't so very outrageous either. Speaking as a fan of Doug Stanhope and Pete and Dud's notorious Derek & Clive records, these contenders are by comparison family-friendly. Which is perhaps no surprise. Tweaking the noses of groups who are universally held to be over-sensitive and thin-skinned? Hell, that's easy mode...no wonder both Chappelle and Burr seem so cheerful.
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Oh boy, oh boy, episode 5! I can’t even pretend not to be excited, even as a joke. :D
1. I continue to love the fake-outs! they may wear out their welcome eventually but so far they're hilarious.
2. This episode made me fully realize just how much I love Mikami Satoshi as Doug. He not only has a great, expressive voice and style of acting, which does absolute wonders for a character as stoic and deadpan as Doug, but he adds an extra dimension of... idek, validity? is that the right word? to the character and the show.
That is to say, Double Decker models itself partly on live action (mainly US/English language) TV; and partly on its predecessor Tiger & Bunny, which modeled itself on American superhero/buddy cop stuff. Mikami's main profile is live action dubbing (and he’s the Japanese voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, hence the Sherlock references in Double Decker that even I recognize) and he absolutely brings that quality to Doug, which helps anchoring the whole show in a particular genre with a particular attitude. If that makes sense.
3. I also continue to fucking love the world design. It's familiar, retro-futuristic, hard-boiled American big city stuff, but subtly infused with surreal craziness, and it's awesome. Just looking at the backgrounds is fun!
4. I also love the dynamics between Doug & Kirill, and I don't mean how obviously shippable they are (that doesn't hurt though) but how well-written their interactions are, how well their dialogues work, how well the implications and callbacks work... Generally the writing in this show is superb, and Doug and Kirill are a great example of handling such a pair well.
5. Kirill is too genre savvy for his own good. :D
6. What's up with Kirill's watch, by the way? Is it just me or is it a bit too elaborate not to have some sort of plot importance eventually?
6. Just, the whole Bamboo Man action set piece from start to finish. Holy shit it was awesome. People are probably going to rag on it because "eww CG!" but as for me, I'm not bothered by that. I thought it was really damn good, you don't see this sort of thing often in anime, and even if overall it probably didn't flow as well as theoretically it could have (a bit more dynamism would have done the scene well), it was still impressive AS. FUCK. Damn.
7. Also... Bamboo Man is a NEXT, isn't he? If it's not the Anthem that gives him powers... also he seems to have a time limit... gee, where have I seen that before...
8. Finally we see Doug losing his cool and it's awesome. Kirill's reaction was great, too - and so very Kirill. "I'm gonna buy us time!" "You have a plan?" "Nope!" :D
9. The twist in the stinger, especially how the whole episode set it up, was so good. Sure, you could guess that something was up, and it was obvious that something was up by the end of the episode, but the stinger was just so well-done, from direction to music.
10. "Since it seems it's over for us, I'll just let you know - you've got that wrong" :DDDD
This show continues to be tons of fun, something to look forward to every week, which is crazy considering how little I expected of it before the first episode.
Unfortunately it also continues to be ridiculously underrated... I understand it doesn’t fit any of the popular trends, but come on guys, it’s a great, fun show! You’re allowed to watch and be fan of more than one show per season!
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THE MUSCLES OF BOB FOSTER'S POWERFUL ARMS BULGE ... as he rat-a-tats on the speed bag at Camelot Country Club
Excerpt from the Journal News, Week of January 8-14, 1969
Photo by Andy Dickerman
FOSTER CLOSE TO PEAK
It was early in the afternoon and Bob Foster, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, had gone to his room for a rest before his daily workout. The champ is training at Camelot Country Club in Spring Valley for his first defense against Frankie DePaula at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 22.
It seemed like the perfect time to get a progress report from his trainer and manager with the big fight less than three weeks away. They had some interesting observations.
"I'm sure glad Bob went home for the Christmas holidays," said his trainer, Johnny Dunn. "He was getting into such good shape that I was afraid he'd hit his peak too soon.
"This was the first Christmas he thought he wouldn't be with his family, but we took a couple of days off and-drove down to Washington, D.C., where he saw his wife and four children. He's real happy and relaxed now. His timing is great, and he has a real fine edge."
Dunn, who's been with the 30-year-old champ since he knocked out Dick Tiger for the title over seven months ago, has trained Terry Downes, Wallace (Bud) Smith, Floyd Patterson and worked with Carmen Basilio. All were champs. How did he feel about his newest king?
"Bobby is one of the greatest light-heavies ever. I compare him with Bob Fitzsimmons (the light-heavy champ at turn of the century). He has the best left hand in the business and tremendous authority in all his punches. I think he'll go on to win the heavy title someday.
"Look at Cassius Clay. They talk about what a great fighter he is, but he was never hit by anybody who punches like Bobby."
Perhaps Dunn is right. After a shaky start which saw him almost quit the ring, Foster has come on like gangbusters for a 33-4 record, that includes 27 knockouts. He’ll be trying for his 13th consecutive win against DePaula, which includes three non-title knockouts since he flattened Tiger.
The Tiger had never been knocked out until the fateful night of May 21 in the Garden when Foster caught him with a left hook-right cross combination he lost money on the deal but winning in the fourth round Bob had to guarantee Tiger $100,000 for his big chance and the title made it all worth it.
Earlier in his career it wasn't quite so nice when he suffered all of his losses to heavyweights of some note, Doug Jones, Ernie Terrell, Zora Foley and Mauro Mina. He was tossed in with Jones on five-day notice in his ninth pro fight and was stopped in eight rounds. He quit for a little while before coming back to beat a later-day Archie Moore, who nobody wanted to fight.
The champ has been at Camelot almost a month. He does 3 to 3 1/2 miles of roadwork in the morning and then spars with Dick Hall, a promising prospect from Boston, Levan Roundtree and Sonny Burkin in the afternoon.
Foster weight 179 now or four pounds over the light-heavy limit, but Dunn guarantees that it isn't any problem.
"There's no weight problem. We just want Bobby to stay up there so he'll have something to lose later. He'll come down to about 174 in the last week of training before the fight," said Dunn.
"We want him to be just right before, the fight-condition is everything. Bobby is great to work with. He's always cool and if you tell him to do anything, he does it.
"Bobby can beat anyone, and he'll go any place just as long as the money is there."
Foster, who is 6’ 2”, and looks like a stinging spider when he's boxing, has also been eating well. The new owners of the often-ill-fated Camelot are Joseph Norban and Hy and Jack Uchitel. All are successful restaurateurs from New York City.
No fighter ever ate better than Bobby," commented Foster's manager, Mushky Sallow. "He has a private chef and we get food regularly from the Voisin and El Morocco Restaurants in New York. Norban and the Uchitels own them. They're two of the finest eating places around."
Good food and plenty of exercise have made Bob Foster a very healthy boy. Or as Bob Foster might say it, very healthy and rich. Or as the oddsmakers would say it, too healthy and rich for Frank Depaula.
_____
The HSRC is pleased to be compiling “This Week in Rockland” a weekly feature appearing in the Rockland Review. Check out other events that happened this week in history! On Newsstands everywhere or online at www.rocklandreviewnews.com
www.RocklandHistory.org
#rockland history#local history#rockland county#nyshistory#spring valley#boxing#camelot country club#bob foster#light heavyweight#fighter#workout#training#fight training
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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/young-bold-and-the-best-news-sports-jobs/
Young, Bold And The Best | News, Sports, Jobs
By DOUG
FERGUSON
AP Golf Writer
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Lowest score in Masters history. Fewest bogeys for the tournament. First player to reach 20-under par. Dustin Johnson can add one more distinction to his historic week at Augusta National, even if this one won’t show up in the record book.
He only gets to keep the green jacket with him for 141 days.
Reminders of this year like no other because of the COVID-19 pandemic are never far away. Only the current champion is allowed to take his green jacket away from the club until the next Masters, which is five months away.
To that end, Johnson gets another footnote in history as the first major champion to have had the coronavirus. It’s easy to overlook he was in self-isolation in a Las Vegas hotel just three weeks before the first of his 268 strokes at the Masters.
“I know 2020 has been a really strange year,” Johnson said. “But it’s been good to me.”
It was good for golf, too.
Despite losing three months in the middle of the season, having the British Open canceled for the first time since World War II and the Ryder Cup postponed until next September in Wisconsin, it still delivered a schedule that will be uninterrupted for 24 weeks until Thanksgiving.
And even with some significant rearranging, three majors provided the perfect snapshot of golf with their winners.
The young. The bold. The best.
Collin Morikawa was 23 when he captured the PGA Championship in his first try with a shot that will rank among the best on the back nine of any major, a driver on the 294-yard 16th hole at Harding Park to 7 feet for an eagle. It was his 28th start as a pro. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods won their first major in their 18th professional event.
Morikawa was the symbol of another youth movement, and this one could turn out to be as strong as the high school class of ’11 group that included Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele and Daniel Berger.
Also in the mix that Sunday at Harding Park were 21-year-old Matthew Wolff and PGA Tour rookie Scottie Scheffler. As the year nears the end, five players under the age 25 are among the top 30 in the world.
The U.S. Open went to Bryson DeChambeau, and his brain won’t get as much credit as his brawn. He went down another rabbit hole, as he likes to say, and emerged a major champion with a bold strategy that only looked dubious until it worked.
He posted the lowest 72-hole score at Winged Foot and won by six. And in a year when governing bodies seemed more determined than ever to curtail distance, DeChambeau showed there is no solution to athleticism. In his case, it’s a body built to swing faster and hit the ball harder.
“Hitting it farther is definitely an easier way to play the game,” DeChambeau said. “No matter what, athletics are always going to be the top of mind in sport, and no matter what sport you’re in.”
He wisely figured out at Winged Foot that with tight, turning fairways on firm turf, no one was going to hit many fairways even playing with shorter clubs they could control, so why not swing for the fences? It worked at Winged Foot, not so much at the Masters, but only because he didn’t hit his irons or putt as well as he did at Winged Foot. That still matters.
DeChambeau will get another crack at reducing Augusta National to a par 67 next April.
Oddly enough, Johnson averaged 67 a day at the Masters, though when asked at the start of the week what was his idea of realistic par at Augusta, Johnson replied, “The par is 72 when you add up the numbers on the holes.”
Simple enough.
Even with two tournaments remaining, the Masters closed the curtain on an extraordinary year, and Johnson is a most extraordinary player. He now has 24 victories on the PGA Tour, at least one in every year except 2014. In his last seven starts, he has three victories, three runner-up finishes and a tie for sixth at the U.S. Open.
Whether it was making only four bogeys all week — back-to-back holes in his second and final rounds — or tying a record by hitting 60 greens in regulation, most impressive about his dominance was the crystal.
The Masters awards crystal highball glasses for anyone making an eagle. Johnson picked up two of those from the par-5 second hole, two putts measuring a combined 8 feet.
He also became the first player to win three crystal vases awarded to the low round each day — a 65 in the first and third rounds, a 68 on the final day. That’s rare in any tournament, much less a major. J.H. Taylor in 1900 at St. Andrews is the only player to have the low score all four rounds.
In a year in which a record five players reached No. 1, Johnson will end the year there. And at this rate, it could be a while before anyone takes it back from him. Odds are he will bring that No. 1 ranking with him to the next Masters, along with his green jacket.
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Essential for Curzon to stay unbeaten — Cunningham
Non-league Football Preview
⚫️ COVID-19: If you’re at a game tomorrow please adhere to all social-distancing guidelines. For more information, including admission, visit individual club websites. Use the NHS covid-19 app and look for the NHS QR posters — specific to each club — which offer a simple and secure way for everyone aged 16 and over to register their attendance. This will help NHS Test-and-Trace identify people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus. The app is available on Android and iOS at:
https://covid19.nhs.uk/help-downloading.html
DOUG THARME and Dale Whitham come back into the reckoning for CURZON ASHTON tomorrow (Saturday) as they look to extend their unbeaten start to the National League North season against Farsley at the Tameside Stadium.
Both have recovered from injury with midfielder Whitham being declared fit after successfully coming through a rigorous training session last night (Thursday).
Two players face fitness tests in the morning. Manager Steve Cunningham is optimistic that striker Darren Stephenson will come through but admits defender Matty Waters could be struggling.
Cunningham, who watched Farsley lose 3-1 to Fylde in the FA Cup in midweek, believes his side are in for a difficult 90 minutes but have what it takes to prevail.
"I came away knowing it'll be a tough game. They pose some genuine threats but if we can deal with them I think we can cause them problems. That's what we have to do because it's important for us to remain unbeaten," said the Nash boss.
He was also keen to praise striker Dom Knowles who already has four goals to his credit. Cunningham said: "Dom's a great guy but what really stands out is his work ethic. He's a really quiet lad for a player of his experience and reputation and has settled in right away. He's a breath of fresh air and it's like he's been here for ages.
"Dom's our talisman and if we can keep him I quite genuinely believe we'll have one of the best number-nines in the league. And I realise that's a big statement."
Farsley, who are managed by former Curzon coach Adam Lakeland, have one point so far — taken from title favourites York City — from two matches.
Winger Will Hayhurst could return after missing the last two games with a shoulder injury, but midfield could be weakened as Joel Byrom is a doubt having taken a knock at Fylde which led to him being subbed. Goalkeeper Steve Drench should return after completing a one-game suspension.
Lakeland accepted Tuesday's FA Cup reverse at Fylde but added: “I couldn't have asked any more of our players. We always keep going and we never know when we’re beaten."
Manager Simon Haworth is expected to ring the changes at Atherton Collieries as he looks to find a first league win for his STALYBRIDGE CELTIC side and get them off the bottom of the Pitching In NPL premier division.
Defender James Ellison has been brought to Bower Fold on a month's loan from Marine, but Haworth will still be without Keano Deacon (hamstring).
Newcomers Will Goodwin and James Helliwell both impressed last weekend, despite the 4-0 home loss to Buxton, and are expected to keep their places. Matty Makinson and Krisel Prifti are both in contention after being left out.
Mike Clegg says ASHTON UNITED could have as many as seven players unavailable as they welcome Mickleover to Hurst Cross following defeats by Matlock and Atherton Collieries.
"It's been horrific. I've never had a week like this before in my time as a manager," the Robins boss commented.
Veteran forward Chris Dagnall, who signed for Ashton earlier this week with wideman Matty Chadwick, is facing suspension after being sent off after only five minutes of the Atherton game.
HYDE UNITED'S home encounter with Whitby has been called off because of two cases of covid-19 among the squad and backroom staff. The Tigers next match should be at Mickleover on Tuesday, October 27.
Striker Antony Brown, signed earlier this week from Silsden, goes straight into the MOSSLEY squad for the FA Trophy second qualifying round tie at Marine.
Ben Richardson remains the only injured player as Dave Fish attempts to get the Lilywhites back on the winning track after four successive defeats.
The winners of the tie receive £3,000. The losers get £775.
GLOSSOP NORTH END have a walkover as they should have met DROYLSDEN who have withdrawn from the NPL.
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(That’s John with the smile, Ellie with sass, Bart in the back thinking “WTF?”, and Ernesto doing his thing)
After a night of hooting owls and howling coyotes, I find myself waking to a glorious sunrise. I don't think twice. Pictures have to be taken even if I have to walk out in the cold morning in a long sleeve shirt and underwear. I look for positions to take a good photo not wanting to stray to far from Frankie, the mobile home I am living in. I get the photos I want, quickly get back inside and begin to prep for work at the shop. Two eggs scrambled for breakfast. Three burgers and broccoli made for lunch.. Fashion wise today I am going for the fading blue denim overalls that covers a navy blue t-shirt. Covering that will be a red and black Pendleton shirt with a matching red scarf. I've decided that the overalls and clogs will be the uniform for the holiday.
The shop is buzzing with energy when I arrive at ten to ten. More pre-orders will be picked up today so Olin, Ellie, Bart and Ernesto are going full bore getting the meat cut for the orders and to fill the cases. Larry, Doug, Jackson and John are at the cases tagging the meats, sausages, chicken and seafood. William is in the back getting the shellfish ready. We'll be opening in 30 minutes. We have to have everything ready when we open the doors. All items tagged, tables disinfected and wiped clean, breads put out in an orderly fashion. Olin takes a break to take us through the pre-order process with redundancy steps built in. Ideally the customers get exactly what they ordered. If not it could affect their whole dinner. Olin takes us through the double checks and triple checks to make sure everyone has what they want.
We open. Soon two trends of the day become clear. The first is a customer asking if the can order a Christmas roast, etc. and us having to inform them that we stopped taking orders after December 18. They can come in the day they would like to purchase as we will have usual cuts. But it will be catch as catch can. We might have them.. We might not. And we won't be answering phones until after Christmas.
The other trend is customers wanting to purchase cuts today and wanting to know if they will still be good by Christmas Day. Yes. But if you freeze it it will lose its color, Chicken and fish will be different. I begin to think we should be selling vacuum sealers as so many customers are asking this question. By now, vacuum seal the meat, put it in the freezer and you will have it forever. Having one will be the solution to their problems.
Margaret gives me a hug and leaves a $100.00 tip. I quickly pull Steven out of line so he doesn't have to wait. I already know what he wants. .45 lb of burger blend loose in the bag. I began to sense the customers who jump the line. They are the ones who are buying retail only and want to get out quickly. I tell Jackson and John to show these people no mercy. I talk some Detroit Tiger baseball with some out of town customers. We are all letting down customers as gently as we can. "We don't have this" "We won't have this" A woman asks if we have bones other than beef. She just found out that her dog is allergic to beef and dairy. I refer he to Harmony Farms in La Crescenta. Keith buys the 70 day dry-aged wagyu and tells me he will be having it with a martini and champagne. Everyone is generally in good spirits and we are taking taking time to converse with customers covering a wide range of subjects: truffles, music, what cheese will go well with apple butter. I recommend trying a 40 day dry aged rib eye to man who is celebrating his birthday today. He buys three. Customer see that my sling is off and acknowledge that with psychic thumbs up. I notice the day is moving very fast.
Linda Love arrives. She asks if anyone has returned her phone. They haven't. Larry, Nate and I talk with Linda.. We know who possibly took it.. an older male and regular customer. It's odd in that we will confront him when we see him next. We take her information and promise to be in touch with should and when it is returned.
The day speeds by. I restock shelves, the cutters are moving at a very fast clip, more orders begin to move. I ask Olin on what day will we be getting the lines that go around the block. She tells me Monday. That means that we will have one more day to warm up before we go full blast. The day ends. No deep cleaning today. Just the surface cleaning of grates, cases, glass and tables. Steaks, cuts, sausages and fish are wrapped and stored. Gaspar finishes cleaning all of the knives and bins. We split up the leftover bread. I take hamburger buns and ciabatta. Larry takes the ciabatta. Gaspar takes ciabatta.
Everyone wants ciabatta.
We finish at 6;45PM. It will be good to get back to Frankie.
#butchershop#butcher#butchery#personal story#ciabatta#rib eye#wagyubeef#wagyu#christmas day#pendletonwool
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